Charles Dickens' London: David Copperfield

In the early part of the book we find Micawber living in very straitened circumstances at Windsor Terrace, City Road, and there little David Copperfield called upon him.

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The house "was shabby like himself, but also, like himself, made all the show it could...the first floor was altogether unfurnished, and the blinds were kept down to delude the neighbours;...the centre of the street-door was perfectly covered with a great brass plate, on which was engraved 'Mrs. Micawber's Boarding Establishment for Young Ladies'...but (remarked Copperfield), I never found that any young lady had ever been to school there...the only visitors I ever saw or heard of were creditors."

The King's Bench Prison (long since disappeared) in the Borough, situated near St. George's Church, soon received Mr. Micawber, whose difficulties came to a crisis, and it was on the occasion of his release, when his wife and Copperfield celebrated the event by a supper of lamb's fry, that, after the egg-flip had freely circulated, Mrs. Micawber proclaimed her immortal resolution that she would "never desert Mr. Micawber."

The Golden Cross Hotel was then a "mouldy sort of establishment in a close neighbourhood," where the youthful Copperfield put up on his visit to London, and where the morning after his arrival the chambermaid tapped at his door at eight o'clock to tell him that his shaving-water was outside, when he so severely felt the non-occasion for it that he blushed in his bed.

Blackfriars, on the water-side, was where Murdstone and Grinby's warehouse stood, where the boy Copperfield was employed at a weekly pittance, washing empty wine bottles and pasting labels on full ones all day long.

Doctors' Commons, then approached from St. Paul's Churchyard by a little low archway, was the scene of Copperfield's subsequent labours at the office of Spenlow and Jorkins, proctors, to whom he was articled.

In Buckingham Street, Adelphi, a set of chambers were taken for him by his aunt, Betsy Trotwood, at the top of the house (a great advantage in her opinion, as being near the fire-escape), consisting of "a little half-blind entry where you see hardly anything, a little stone-blind pantry where you could see nothing at all, a sitting-room and a bedroom," where he subsequently, aided by Mrs. Crupp the landlady, gave two memorable "domestic little parties."

His friend Traddles lodged in a little street near the Veterinary College at Camden Town, and afterwards "up behind the parapet of a house in Castle Street, Holborn"

It was while passing the portico of St. Martin's Church, one bitter and snowy night, that Copperfield encountered at the corner of the lane Martha Endell, once "little Em'ly's" work-companion at Mr. Omer's, a young woman, whom Ham had told him, "Em'ly knowed once, and doen't ought to know no more."

And it was hard by, in a public room in the stable-yard of the Golden Cross, that Copperfield took Mr. Peggotty, whom he had just afterwards met, and where Martha listened behind the door to their conversation about Emily.

When Copperfield, after his great bereavement, returned to London from a visit to the Continent, he alighted at the door of the Gray's Inn Coffee House, and immediately went to see Traddles in his chambers, Holborn Court, close by, whom he found married to "Sophy from Devonshire," and two of her numerous and pretty sisters living with them.

Copperfield, upon returning to his inn, thus dwells upon the scene: "If I had beheld a thousand roses blowing in a top set of chambers in that withered Gray's Inn, they could not have brightened it half so much.

The idea of those Devonshire girls among the dry law-stationers and the attorneys' offices; and of the tea and toast, and children's songs, in that grim atmosphere of pounce and parchment, red-tape, dusty wafers, ink-jars, brief and draft paper, law reports, writs, declarations, and bills of costs, seem'd almost as pleasantly fanciful as if I had dreamed that the Sultan's famous family had been admitted on the roll of attorneys, and had brought the talking bird, the singing tree, and the golden water, into Gray's Inn Hall."

Next: Charles Dickens' London: Bleak House