ny hamlets and villages
beyond.

[Illustration: _London at the Time of the Great Fire_]

Even in Dickens' day each centre of urban life, whether it be Chelsea,
Whitechapel, or the Borough,--that ill-defined centre south of London
Bridge,--was closely identified with local conditions which were no part
of the life of any other section. Aside from the varying conditions of
social life, or whether the section was purely residential, or whether it
was a manufacturing community, there were other conditions as markedly
different. Theatres, shops, and even churches varied as to their method of
conduct, and, in some measure, of their functions as well. It was but
natural that the demand of the Ratcliffe Highway for the succulent
"kipper" should conduce to a vastly different method of purveying the
edible necessities of life from that of the West End poulterer who sold
only Surrey fowl, or, curiously enough, as he really does, Scotch salmon.
So, too, with the theatres and music-halls; the lower riverside population
demand, if not necessarily a short shrift, a cheap fare, and so he gets
his two and three performances a night at a price ranging from three
pence to two shillings for what in the west brings from one to ten
shillings.

To vary the simile still farther, but without going into the intricacies
of dogma, the church has of necessity to appeal to its constituency in the
slums in a vastly different method of procedure from what would be
considered dignified or even devout elsewhere; and it is a question if the
former is not more efficacious than the latter. And so these various
centres, as they may be best described, are each of themselves local
communities welded, let us hope, into as near as may be a perfect whole,
with a certain leeway of self-government and privilege to deal with local
conditions.

In 1850, taken as best representative of Dickens' time, London was divided
into twenty-six wards (and several liberties). The "Out Parishes" of the
"City," the City of Westminster, and the five "Parliamentary Boroughs" of
Marylebone, Lambeth, Southwark, Finsbury, and Tower hamlets, and a region
of debatable land lying somewhere between that which is properly called
London and its environs, and partaking in a certain measure of the
attributes of both.

London would seem to be particularly fortunate in its situation, and that
a large city should have grown up here was perhaps unavoidable:
sufficiently far from the ope