little straw chair on the mystery of mortality until he gave it up
as a bad job.
You do not come upon these churchyards violently; there are shapes
of transition in the neighbourhood. An antiquated news shop, or
barber’s shop, apparently bereft of customers in the earlier days
of George the Third, would warn me to look out for one, if any
discoveries in this respect were left for me to make. A very quiet
court, in combination with an unaccountable dyer’s and scourer’s,
would prepare me for a churchyard. An exceedingly retiring publichouse,
with a bagatelle-board shadily visible in a sawdusty parlour
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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
shaped like an omnibus, and with a shelf of punch-bowls in the bar,
would apprise me that I stood near consecrated ground. A ‘Dairy,’
exhibiting in its modest window one very little milk-can and three
eggs, would suggest to me the certainty of finding the poultry hard
by, pecking at my forefathers. I first inferred the vicinity of
Saint Ghastly Grim, from a certain air of extra repose and gloom
pervading a vast stack of warehouses.
From the hush of these places, it is congenial to pass into the
hushed resorts of business. Down the lanes I like to see the carts
and waggons huddled together in repose, the cranes idle, and the
warehouses shut. Pausing in the alleys behind the closed Banks of
mighty Lombard-street, it gives one as good as a rich feeling to
think of the broad counters with a rim along the edge, made for
telling money out on, the scales for weighing precious metals, the
ponderous ledgers, and, above all, the bright copper shovels for
shovelling gold. When I draw money, it never seems so much money
as when it is shovelled at me out of a bright copper shovel. I
like to say, ‘In gold,’ and to see seven pounds musically pouring
out of the shovel, like seventy; the Bank appearing to remark to me
– I italicise APPEARING – ‘if you want more of this yellow earth,
we keep it in barrows at your service.’ To think of the banker’s
clerk with his deft finger turning the crisp edges of the Hundred-
Pound Notes he has taken in a fat roll out of a drawer, is again to
hear the rustling of that delicious south-cash wind. ‘How will you
have it?’ I once heard this usual question asked at a Bank Counter
of an elderly female, habited in mourning and steeped in
simplicity, who answered, open-eyed, crook-fingered, laughing with
expectation, ‘Anyhow!’ Calling these things to mind as I stroll
among the Banks, I wonder whether the other solitary Sunday man I
pass, has designs upon the Banks. For the interest and mystery of
the matter, I almost hope he may have, and that his confederate may
be at this moment taking impressions of the keys of the iron
closets in wax, and that a delightful robbery may be in course of
transaction. About College-hill, Mark-lane, and so on towards the
Tower, and Dockward, the deserted wine-merchants’ cellars are fine
subjects for consideration; but the deserted money-cellars of the
Bankers, and their plate-cellars, and their jewel-cellars, what
subterranean regions of the Wonderful Lamp are these! And again:
possibly some shoeless boy in rags, passed through this street
yesterday, for whom it is reserved to be a Banker in the fulness of
time, and to be surpassing rich. Such reverses have been, since
the days of Whittington; and were, long before. I want to know
whether the boy has any foreglittering of that glittering fortune
now, when he treads these stones, hungry. Much as I also want to
know whether the next man to be hanged at Newgate yonder, had any
suspicion upon him that he was moving steadily towards that fate,
when he talked so much about the last man who paid the same great
debt at the same small Debtors’ Door.
Where are all the people who on busy working-days pervade these
scenes? The locomotive banker’s clerk, who carries a black
portfolio chained to him by a chain of steel, where is he? Does he
go to bed with his chain on – to church with his chain on – or does