their mystery; mysterious I found them; mysterious they shall
remain for me.
Where shall I begin my round of hidden and forgotten old churches
in the City of London?
Page 54
Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
It is twenty minutes short of eleven on a Sunday morning, when I
stroll down one of the many narrow hilly streets in the City that
tend due south to the Thames. It is my first experiment, and I
have come to the region of Whittington in an omnibus, and we have
put down a fierce-eyed, spare old woman, whose slate-coloured gown
smells of herbs, and who walked up Aldersgate-street to some chapel
where she comforts herself with brimstone doctrine, I warrant. We
have also put down a stouter and sweeter old lady, with a pretty
large prayer-book in an unfolded pocket-handkerchief, who got out
at a corner of a court near Stationers’ Hall, and who I think must
go to church there, because she is the widow of some deceased old
Company’s Beadle. The rest of our freight were mere chance
pleasure-seekers and rural walkers, and went on to the Blackwall
railway. So many bells are ringing, when I stand undecided at a
street corner, that every sheep in the ecclesiastical fold might be
a bell-wether. The discordance is fearful. My state of indecision
is referable to, and about equally divisible among, four great
churches, which are all within sight and sound, all within the
space of a few square yards.
As I stand at the street corner, I don’t see as many as four people
at once going to church, though I see as many as four churches with
their steeples clamouring for people. I choose my church, and go
up the flight of steps to the great entrance in the tower. A
mouldy tower within, and like a neglected washhouse. A rope comes
through the beamed roof, and a man in the corner pulls it and
clashes the bell – a whity-brown man, whose clothes were once black
– a man with flue on him, and cobweb. He stares at me, wondering
how I come there, and I stare at him, wondering how he comes there.
Through a screen of wood and glass, I peep into the dim church.
About twenty people are discernible, waiting to begin. Christening
would seem to have faded out of this church long ago, for the font
has the dust of desuetude thick upon it, and its wooden cover
(shaped like an old-fashioned tureen-cover) looks as if it wouldn’t
come off, upon requirement. I perceive the altar to be rickety and
the Commandments damp. Entering after this survey, I jostle the
clergyman in his canonicals, who is entering too from a dark lane
behind a pew of state with curtains, where nobody sits. The pew is
ornamented with four blue wands, once carried by four somebodys, I
suppose, before somebody else, but which there is nobody now to
hold or receive honour from. I open the door of a family pew, and
shut myself in; if I could occupy twenty family pews at once I
might have them. The clerk, a brisk young man (how does HE come
here?), glances at me knowingly, as who should say, ‘You have done
it now; you must stop.’ Organ plays. Organ-loft is in a small
gallery across the church; gallery congregation, two girls. I
wonder within myself what will happen when we are required to sing.
There is a pale heap of books in the corner of my pew, and while
the organ, which is hoarse and sleepy, plays in such fashion that I
can hear more of the rusty working of the stops than of any music,
I look at the books, which are mostly bound in faded baize and
stuff. They belonged in 1754, to the Dowgate family; and who were
they? Jane Comport must have married Young Dowgate, and come into
the family that way; Young Dowgate was courting Jane Comport when
he gave her her prayer-book, and recorded the presentation in the
fly-leaf; if Jane were fond of Young Dowgate, why did she die and
leave the book here? Perhaps at the rickety altar, and before the