Charles Dickens' London: Great Expectations

At the Cross Keys, Wood Street, Cheapside, Pip arrived in London from his home in the Kentish marshes.

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In Little Britain, in a gloomy street just off Smithfield, and close by the coach-office, were the business premises of Mr. Jaggers, the criminal attorney.

At Barnard's Inn (which Pip thought was an hotel kept by a Mr. Barnard), where Herbert Pocket, the "prowling boy" of his youth, had rooms, Pip slept on his arrival, but he "found Barnard to be a disembodied spirit or a fiction, and his inn the dingiest collection of shabby buildings ever squeezed together in a rank corner as a club for Tom-cats."

Walworth, "a collection of black lanes, ditches, and little gardens," reminds us of Wemmick's (Jaggers' clerk's) little wooden cottage, the top cut out and painted like a battery mounted with guns, with a flag-staff at top and a bridge crossing a chasm some four feet wide and two deep with a drawbridge to cut off the communication.

Here he lived with his father, the "Aged," and was periodically visited by Miss Skiffins, his fiancee, "of wooden appearance," and apparently possessed of "portable property."

In Gerrard Street, Soho, a house on the south side was Jaggers' private abode, a building with carved garlands on the panelled walls, whose loops reminded Pip of a hangman's noose.

Pip and Pocket, after leaving Barnard's Inn, took chambers at the top of the last house in Garden Court, Temple, down by the river. (It has been much altered.)

There, one stormy night, Magwitch, the convict, back from New South Wales, went to see the astonished Pip.

In Essex Street, in a quiet lodging, the back looking into the Temple, Magwitch was hidden on the second floor.

The Court-house reminds us of Magwitch's trial and sentence in the dock, when thirty-two men and women were formally doomed to death; the custom then being to devote a concluding day of the Sessions to "make a finishing effect with the Sentence of Death" by pronouncing it upon all collectively.

While in the dock, it will be remembered, Pip held Magwitch's hand, and the convict, being too injured to stand, was allowed to sit on one of its corners.

Newgate recalls Wemmick, who "walked among the prisoners (awaiting their trial) as a gardener might walk among his plants."

Next: Charles Dickens' London: Our Mutual Friend