target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ue018dfb9-f821-4933-9d1b-1156cc25b4f7">[1] have been sold in England alone, exclusive of the almost innumerable popular editions, from one penny upwards, published by other firms, the copyright of this work having expired. The penny edition was sold by hundreds of thousands in the streets of London some years ago.
This statement will probably be surprising to the remarkable class of readers thus described by that staunch admirer of Dickens, Mr. Andrew Lang, in "Phiz," one of his charming Lost Leaders. He says:—
"It is a singular and gloomy feature in the character of young ladies and gentlemen of a particular type, that they have ceased to care for Dickens, as they have ceased to care for Scott. They say they cannot read Dickens. When Mr. Pickwick's adventures are presented to the modern maid, she behaves like the Cambridge freshman. 'Euclide viso, cohorruit et evasit.' When he was shown Euclid he evinced dismay, and sneaked off. Even so do most young people act when they are expected to read Nicholas Nickleby and Martin Chuzzlewit. They call these master-pieces 'too gutterly gutter'; they cannot sympathize with this honest humour and conscious pathos. Consequently the innumerable references to Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp, and Mr. Pecksniff, and Mr. Winkle, which fill our ephemeral literature, are written for these persons in an unknown tongue. The number of people who could take a good pass in Mr. Calverley's Pickwick Examination Paper is said to be diminishing. Pathetic questions are sometimes put. Are we not too much cultivated? Can this fastidiousness be anything but a casual passing phase of taste? Are all people over thirty who cling to their Dickens and their Scott old fogies? Are we wrong in preferring them to Bootles' Baby, and The Quick or the Dead, and the novels of M. Paul Bourget?"
But this by the way. Turning down Essex Street, we visit the Temple, celebrated in several of Dickens's novels—Barnaby Rudge, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend—but in none more graphically than in Martin Chuzzlewit, in which is described the fountain in Fountain Court, where Ruth Pinch goes to meet her lover, "coming briskly up, with the best little laugh upon her face that ever played in opposition to the fountain; and beat it all to nothing." And when John Westlock came at last, "merrily the fountain leaped and danced, and merrily the smiling dimples twinkled and expanded more and more, until they broke into a laugh against the basin's rim, and vanished." As we saw the fountain on the bright August morning of our tramp, the few shrubs, flowers, and ferns planted round it gave it quite a rural effect, and we wished long life to the solitary specimen of eucalyptus, whose glaucous-green leaves and tender shoots seemed ill-fitted to bear the nipping frosts of our variable climate.
Coming out of the Temple by Middle Temple Lane, we pass on our left Child's Bank, the "Tellson's Bank" of A Tale of Two Cities, "which was an old-fashioned place even in the year 1780," but was replaced in 1878 by the handsome building suitable to its imposing neighbours, the Law Courts. Temple Bar, which adjoined the Old Bank, and was one of the relics of Dickens's London, has passed away, having since been re-erected on "Theobalds," near Waltham Cross.
"A walk down Fleet Street"—one of Dr. Johnson's enjoyments—leads us to Whitefriars Street, on the east side of which, at No. 67, is the office of The Daily News, edited by Dickens from 21 Jany. to 9 Feby., 1846, and for which he wrote the original prospectus, and subsequently, in a series of letters descriptive of his Italian travel, his delightful Pictures from Italy. St. Dunstan's Church in Fleet Street is supposed to have been that immortalized in The Chimes.
It was in this street many years before (in the year 1833, when he was only twenty-one), as recorded in Forster's Life, that Dickens describes himself as dropping his first literary sketch, Mrs. Joseph Porter over the Way, "stealthily one evening at twilight, with fear and trembling, into a dark letter-box in a dark office up a dark court in Fleet Street; and he has told his agitation when it appeared in all the glory of print:—'On which occasion I walked down to Westminster Hall, and turned into it for half an hour, because my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride, that they could not bear the street, and were not fit to be seen there.'" The "dark court" referred to was no doubt Johnson's Court, as the printers of the Monthly Magazine, Messrs. Baylis and Leighton, had their offices here. This contribution appeared in the January number 1834 of this magazine, published by Messrs. Cochrane and Macrone of 11 Waterloo Place.
Turning up Chancery Lane, also celebrated in many of Charles Dickens's novels, we leave on our left Bell Yard, where lodged the ruined suitor in Chancery, poor Gridley, "the man from Shropshire" in Bleak House, but the yard has, through part of it being required for the New Law Courts and other modern improvements, almost lost its identity.
On our right is Old Serjeant's Inn, which leads into Clifford's Inn, where the conference took place between John Rokesmith and Mr. Boffin, when the former, to the latter's amazement, said:—"If you would try me as your Secretary." The place is thus referred to in the eighth chapter of Our Mutual Friend:—
"Not very well knowing how to get rid of this applicant, and feeling the more embarrassed because his manner and appearance claimed a delicacy in which the worthy Mr. Boffin feared he himself might be deficient, that gentleman glanced into the mouldy little plantation or cat preserve, of Clifford's Inn, as it was that day, in search of a suggestion. Sparrows were there, dry-rot and wet-rot were there, but it was not otherwise a suggestive spot."
Symond's Inn, described as "a little, pale, wall-eyed, woebegone inn, like a large dust-bin of two compartments and a sifter,"—where Mr. Vholes had his chambers, and where Ada Clare came to live after her marriage, there tending lovingly the blighted life of the suitor in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, poor Richard Carstone—exists no more. It formerly stood on the site of Nos. 25, 26, and 27, now handsome suites of offices.
Lincoln's Inn, a little higher up on the opposite side of the way, claims our attention, in the Hall of which was formerly the Lord High Chancellor's Court, wherein the wire-drawn Chancery suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce in Bleak House dragged its course wearily along. The offices of Messrs. Kenge and Carboy, of Old Square, Solicitors in the famous suit, were visited by Esther Summerson, who says:—"We passed into sudden quietude, under an old gallery, and drove on through a silent square, until we came to an old nook in a corner, where there was an entrance up a steep broad flight of stairs like an entrance to a church." Mr. Serjeant Snubbin, Mr. Pickwick's counsel in the notorious cause of Bardell v. Pickwick, also had his chambers in this square. We then enter Lincoln's Inn Fields, and pay a visit to No. 58, on the furthest or west side near Portsmouth Street. This ancient mansion was the residence of Dickens's friend and biographer, John Forster, before he went to live at Palace Gate. It is minutely described in the tenth chapter of Bleak House as the residence of Mr. Tulkinghorn, "a large house, formerly a house of state, … let off in sets of chambers now; and in those shrunken fragments of its greatness lawyers lie like maggots in nuts." The "foreshortened allegory in the person of one impossible Roman upside down," who afterwards points to the "new meaning" (i.e. the murder of Mr. Tulkinghorn) has, it is to be regretted, since been whitewashed. On the 30th November, 1844, here Dickens read The Chimes to a few intimate friends, an event immortalized by Maclise's pencil, and, as appreciative of the feelings of the audience, Forster alludes "to the grave attention of Carlyle, the eager interest of Stanfield and Maclise, the keen look of poor Laman Blanchard, Fox's rapt solemnity, Jerrold's skyward gaze, and the tears of Harness and Dyce."
That celebrated tavern called the "Magpie and Stump," referred to in the twenty-first chapter of Pickwick—where that hero spent an interesting evening on the invitation of Lowten (Mr. Perker's clerk), and heard "the old man's
