Charles Dickens' London: Martin Chuzzlewit

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Arthur H. Beavan continued his survey of London place references in Dickens' works with this look at Martin Chuzzlewit, from Imperial London, published in 1901:

The Monument, of course, is intensely associated with Mr. Pecksniff and his daughters; for did not Mrs. Todgers keep her boarding-house beneath its shadow near some fruit-brokers' offices, and did not Pecksniff arrive there from Salisbury by coach early one morning when "there was a dense fog too - as if it were a city in the clouds which they had been travelling to all night upon magic bean-stalks - and a thick crust upon the pavement like oil-cake, which one of the outsiders (mad, no doubt) said to another (his keeper, of course) was snow."

Mrs. Gamp lodged in Kingsgate Street, High Holborn, with Paul (called Poll) Sweedlepipe, bird-fancier and barber.

The Temple will ever be sacred to the memory of Ruth and Tom Pinch, and John Westlock.

Thither to uninhabited chambers Tom came each day to employment so mysteriously provided for him as a librarian, and "every echo of his footsteps sounded to him like a sound from the old walls and pavements wanting language to relate the histories of the dim dismal rooms; to whisper of dark bins of rare old wine bricked up in vaults among the old foundations of the Halls; or mutter in a lower tone yet darker legends of the cross-legged knights whose marble effigies were in the church."

Fountain Court was the trysting-place of Ruth Pinch and Westlock, and has probably been selected for the same interesting purpose by innumerable pairs of lovers since Martin Chuzzlewit was written.

Next: Charles Dickens' London: The Old Curiosity Shop