The Victorian City: Everyday Life In Dickens' London - Plot & Excerpts
It is a quarter to ten at night, yet as ‘She tore along the narrow pavement’ she found herself ‘elbowing the passengers from side to side; and darting almost under the horses’ heads, cross[ing] crowded streets, where clusters of persons were eagerly watching their opportunity to do the like’. It is only when she reaches the West End that the streets become less crowded, and even then there are plenty of people about who turn to watch this frantic woman running along.That the London streets were always busy, always teeming with humanity, is a regular feature of travellers’ accounts of the city. In 1852, Max Schlesinger, a German journalist who spent much of his life in London, said ‘there is not a single hour in the four and twenty’ when the main streets were empty. When Charlotte and Anne Brontë had planned their first visit to London ‘in the quiet of Haworth Parsonage’, they had expected to walk from their lodgings at the Chapter Coffee House in Paternoster Row, near St Paul’s, to their publisher in Cornhill, a few hundred yards away.
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