the few really
fine modern thoroughfares of a great city.

Eastward again Furnival's Inn, where Pickwick was written, has fallen at
the hands of the house-breaker.

The office of the old _Monthly Magazine_ is no more, its very doorway and
letter-box--"wherein was dropped stealthily one night" the precious
manuscript of "Pickwick"--being now in the possession of an ardent Dickens
collector, having been removed from its former site in Johnson's Court in
Fleet Street at the time the former edifice was pulled down.

Across the river historic and sordid Marshalsea, where the elder Dickens
was incarcerated for debt, has been dissipated in air; even its walls are
not visible to-day, if they even exist, and a modern park--though it is
mostly made up of flagstones--stands in its place as a moral, healthful,
and politic force of the neighbourhood.

With the scenes and localities identified with the plots and characters of
the novels the same cleaning up process has gone on, one or another
shrine being from time to time gutted, pulled to pieces, or removed. On
the other hand, doubtless much that existed in the fancy, or real thought,
of the author still remains, as the door-knocker of No. 8 Craven Street,
Strand, the conjectured original of which is described in the "Christmas
Carol," which appeared to the luckless Scrooge as "not a knocker but
Marley's face;" or the Spaniards Inn on Hampstead Heath described in the
XLVI. Chapter of Pickwick, which stands to-day but little, if any, changed
since that time.

For the literary life of the day which is reflected by the mere memory of
the names of such of Dickens' contemporaries in art and letters, as Mark
Lemon, W. H. Wills, Wilkie Collins, Cruikshank, "Phiz," Forster, Blanchard
Jerrold, Maclise, Fox, Dyce, and Stanfield, one can only resort to a
history of mid or early Victorian literature to realize the same to the
full. Such is not the scheme of this book, but that London,--the
city,--its surroundings, its lights and shadows, its topography, and its
history, rather, is to be followed in a sequence of co-related events
presented with as great a degree of cohesion and attractive arrangement as
will be thought to be commensurate and pertinent to the subject. Formerly,
when London was a "snug city," authors more readily confined their
incomings and outgoings to a comparatively small area. To-day "the
city" is a term only synonymous with a restricted region which gathers
around the