Charles Dickens' London: Bleak House

Bleak House is rich in allusions to London - legal London especially - and the localities referred to can be identified with almost absolute accuracy.

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First we have the Lord Chancellor during implacable November weather, sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall, the old Hall still standing in Old Buildings - "Fog every where."

Adjoining, in Old Square, were the offices of Kenge and Carboy, whither Esther Summerson comes up from the country to go before the Chancellor; and where Mr. Guppy, referring to the fog, says, "This is a London particular," and leaving Esther in Mr. Kenge's room while he goes into Court, requests her to partake of some refreshment meanwhile, biscuits and a decanter of wine being on a small table, and look over the paper."

Lincoln's Inn Fields breathes the very atmosphere of Bleak House.

On the western side, in rooms at No. 58 - a stone-built house with rounded portico resting on Doric columns - lived John Forster, whose apartments Dickens chose to represent as the chambers, etc. of "the old man of the name of Tulkinghorn," most inscrutable of family lawyers.

Yet even in this instance, the great novelist did not give an absolutely literal reproduction of the mise en scene; for Mr. Forster occupied not the upper, but the big ground-floor rooms, and no "Allegory in Roman helmet and celestial linen" sprawled upon the ceiling.

It was from this house that Mr. Tulkinghorn emerged one evening, and walked through Lincoln's Inn, passing beneath its ancient Tudor gateway on a visit to Mr. Snagsby, the law-stationer in Cook's Court (Took's Court), Cursitor Street - with a view of ascertaining where Nemo, the mysterious law-writer, lived.

The Smallweed family resided "in a rather ill-favoured and ill-savoured neighbourhood," though one of its rising grounds bears the name of Mount Pleasant, now occupied by the auxiliary General Post Office.

Mr. Vholes, attorney, who had an aged parent dependent upon him in the vale of Taunton, had offices in Symond's Inn, Chancery Lane, on the ground floor; while Richard Carston, his unfortunate client, one of the parties in the great Jarndyce Chancery suit, in order to be near his legal adviser, had apartments in the same building on the second floor.

But where was the rag-and-bottle shop, whose gin-soaked proprietor died from spontaneous combustion? and where did Miss Flite and Nemo lodge?

Krook's shop is spoken of as "lying and being in the shadow of the wall" "blinded by the wall."

No house in Bishop's Court, Chancery Lane, exactly answers this description.

On the contrary, the only likely one is at the corner, next to "Old Sol's," and faces an open passage-way which leads to New Square.

Krook's must therefore be sought at Nos. 8 and 9, in the Rents (now occupied by a law-stationer and a cobbler), opposite the Old Ship, fronting the court on one side, and on the other "within a couple of yards off and entirely blinded by the wall " so often referred to in the narrative.

Miss Flite, meeting Esther Summerson and the wards in Chancery one morning in Old Square, invites them to her lodging.

Says Esther, "slipping us out at a little side-gate, she stopped most unexpectedly in a narrow back street, part of some courts and lanes immediately outside the wall of the Inn" - and she was at home. (The back street was Star Yard, leading to Carey Street.)

She lived in a garret at the top of Krook's shop, described as blinded by the wall of Lincoln's Inn, which intercepted the light within a couple of yards.

It was a fairly large room from which she had a glimpse of the roof of Lincoln's Inn Hall - the new one, for the old Hall is shut out from view by the houses in Old Buildings.

It was during this visit that the poor little creature drew aside the curtain of the long low window and called attention to a number of bird-cages hanging there, whose occupants Lady Jane the cat was for ever striving to devour, crouching "on the parapet outside for hours and hours."

This is conclusive testimony as to the identity of Krook's, for no other house in the court possesses an attic with an outside parapet.

In a miserable back-room on the second floor of this dismal abode, Captain Hawdon, alias Nemo, was found dead by Mr. Tulkinghorn and Krook - dying by his own hand from an overdose of opium.

A little to the south of Old Buildings on the west side of Chancery Lane, are Bishop's Court and Chichester Rents, the latter approached through a passage alongside the Three Tuns public-house.

To the Rents, when Nemo had committed suicide, came the "two gentlemen not very neat about the cuffs and buttons," who instituted perquisitions through the court, dived into the "Sol's" parlour, and wrote with ravenous little pens on tissue-paper, those sensational reports of the inquest which had just been held at that well-known and popular house of entertainment, the Old Sol's Arms.

The Old Ship Tavern (taken down), unquestionably the original of "Sol's," stood at the head of the court facing it on one side and the wall of Lincoln's Inn on the other.

On the first floor was the long low room where the coroner presided, and where little Swills, the comic vocalist, presented to the harmonic meeting, his admirable impersonation of that important official.

"Darkness," says Dickens, "falls upon the court and upon the garret at the close of the inquest...then there is rest around the lonely figure now laid in its last earthly habitation; and it is watched by the gaunt eyes in the shutters through some quiet hours of night.

If this forlorn man could have been prophetically seen lying here, by the mother at whose breast he nestled, a little child, with eyes upraised to her loving face, and soft hand scarcely knowing how to close upon the neck to which it crept, what an impossibility the vision would have seemed...!"

A horrible little burying-ground in Russell Court, Drury Lane, used to entirely satisfy sticklers for absolute accuracy.

"Into a beastly scrap of ground," says Dickens, "which a Turk would reject as a savage abomination, and a Caffre would shudder at, they bring our dear brother, here departed, to receive Christian burial. With houses looking on, on every side, save where a reeking little tunnel of a court gives access to the iron gate - with every villainy of life in action close on death, and every poisonous element of death in action close on life - here they lower our dear brother down a foot or two."

On the steps leading to this charnel-house, "Dame Durden," at the close of the long pursuit undertaken at the instance of Mr. Bucket, the detective, found her poor mother dead, "with one arm creeping round the bar of the iron gate, and seeming to embrace it."

But a recently-constructed road has obliterated the burial-ground - that hemmed-in area where poor Jo saw the stranger put into the ground "werry nigh the top," and whence hundreds of corpses, piled up just as Dickens pictured them, have at last been carted away.

Next: Charles Dickens' London: Little Dorrit