cliff; and this speculation came over me: If this mud could
petrify at this moment, and could lie concealed here for ten
thousand years, I wonder whether the race of men then to be our
successors on the earth could, from these or any marks, by the
utmost force of the human intellect, unassisted by tradition,
deduce such an astounding inference as the existence of a polished
state of society that bore with the public savagery of neglected
children in the streets of its capital city, and was proud of its
power by sea and land, and never used its power to seize and save
them!
After this, when I came to the Old Bailey and glanced up it towards
Newgate, I found that the prison had an inconsistent look. There
seemed to be some unlucky inconsistency in the atmosphere that day;
for though the proportions of St. Paul’s Cathedral are very
beautiful, it had an air of being somewhat out of drawing, in my
eyes. I felt as though the cross were too high up, and perched
upon the intervening golden ball too far away.
Facing eastward, I left behind me Smithfield and Old Bailey, – fire
and faggot, condemned hold, public hanging, whipping through the
city at the cart-tail, pillory, branding-iron, and other beautiful
ancestral landmarks, which rude hands have rooted up, without
bringing the stars quite down upon us as yet, – and went my way
upon my beat, noting how oddly characteristic neighbourhoods are
divided from one another, hereabout, as though by an invisible line
across the way. Here shall cease the bankers and the moneychangers;
here shall begin the shipping interest and the nauticalinstrument
shops; here shall follow a scarcely perceptible
flavouring of groceries and drugs; here shall come a strong
infusion of butchers; now, small hosiers shall be in the ascendant;
henceforth, everything exposed for sale shall have its ticketed
price attached. All this as if specially ordered and appointed.
A single stride at Houndsditch Church, no wider than sufficed to
cross the kennel at the bottom of the Canon-gate, which the debtors
in Holyrood sanctuary were wont to relieve their minds by skipping
over, as Scott relates, and standing in delightful daring of
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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
catchpoles on the free side, – a single stride, and everything is
entirely changed in grain and character. West of the stride, a
table, or a chest of drawers on sale, shall be of mahogany and
French-polished; east of the stride, it shall be of deal, smeared
with a cheap counterfeit resembling lip-salve. West of the stride,
a penny loaf or bun shall be compact and self-contained; east of
the stride, it shall be of a sprawling and splay-footed character,
as seeking to make more of itself for the money. My beat lying
round by Whitechapel Church, and the adjacent sugar-refineries, –
great buildings, tier upon tier, that have the appearance of being
nearly related to the dock-warehouses at Liverpool, – I turned off
to my right, and, passing round the awkward corner on my left, came
suddenly on an apparition familiar to London streets afar off.
What London peripatetic of these times has not seen the woman who
has fallen forward, double, through some affection of the spine,
and whose head has of late taken a turn to one side, so that it now
droops over the back of one of her arms at about the wrist? Who
does not know her staff, and her shawl, and her basket, as she
gropes her way along, capable of seeing nothing but the pavement,
never begging, never stopping, for ever going somewhere on no
business? How does she live, whence does she come, whither does
she go, and why? I mind the time when her yellow arms were naught
but bone and parchment. Slight changes steal over her; for there
is a shadowy suggestion of human skin on them now. The Strand may
be taken as the central point about which she revolves in a halfmile
orbit. How comes she so far east as this? And coming back
too! Having been how much farther? She is a rare spectacle in
this neighbourhood. I receive intelligent information to this