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National Geographic : 1974 Apr
Contents
"Buildings ... dirtiest and the vessels... black est," Dickens writes in Oliver Twist of the unsa vory region in Rotherhithe where murderer Bill Sikes hides from his pursuers. Today much of the Thames-side area (left) is being rebuilt. Resplendent in beard and scarf, an unorthodox Londoner (above) seems a look-alike for Sikes's accomplice Fagin (below), condemned to the gal lows for his crimes. "His unwashed flesh crackled with the fever that burnt him up," Dickens writes of Fagin the night before his execution. "Those dreadful walls of Newgate ... never held so dread a spectacle as that." Tulkinghorn in Bleak House, was a caller there. It is now used for offices. Beyond the Forster-Tulkinghorn house lies Lincoln's Inn, a collection of buildings, some elderly, some new but built in the old style, grouped around gardens and court yards. Lincoln's is one of London's four Inns of Court-ancient guilds or colleges to which all members of the English bar belong, with offices and living quarters for barristers and some solicitors, and with libraries and lecture halls for students. Nearby one finds Cursitor Street and Took's Court, a hideaway alley full of accountants and lawyers busily checking figures or draw ing up documents behind the bland facades of elegant old houses. T OOK'S COURT appears in Bleak House as Cook's Court, where Mr. Snagsby, the law stationer, "dealt in all sorts of blank forms of legal process; in skins and rolls of parchment; in paper-foolscap, brief, draft, brown, white, whitey-brown, and blotting; in stamps; in office-quills, pens, ink, India rubber... in pocket-books, almanacks, dia ries, and law lists; in string boxes, rulers, ink stands-glass and leaden, penknives, scissors, bodkins, and other small office-cutlery." Though the original of Mr. Snagsby's has been erased by that great India-rubber, time, plenty of other stationers' windows remain full of office cutlery. Moving on through the Holborn district, I strolled into Gray's Inn, another of London's legal universities. Within the boundary of the Inn is South Square and the house, No. 1, where Dickens worked as a very junior clerk -he was 15-to attorney Edward Blackmore. I stood in the dark paneled hall and imagined him darting through it and leaping with schoolboyish glee over the worn front door step and into the freedom of the court at the end of his day's labors. The ghosts of many a long-departed attor ney must haunt this part of Holborn, and not only at Gray's Inn. Close at hand is Barnard's Inn, once linked with Gray's Inn as a legal preparatory school for boys who were not old enough to study at the senior Inn. "The dingiest collection of shabby build ings ever squeezed together in a rank corner as a club for Tom-cats," was how Dickens summed up Barnard's when he sent Pip to share a set of rooms there with Herbert Pocket in GreatExpectations. 465
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