I took a steamboat one day at Westminster Bridge, and after a voyage of 40
minutes or so landed near Limehouse Hole, and followed the river streets
both east and west. It was easy enough to trace the course of Mortimer
Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn, as they walked under the guidance of
Riderhood through the stormy night from their rooms in The Temple, four
miles away, past the Tower and the London Docks, and down by the slippery
water's edge to Limehouse Hole, when they went to cause Gaffer Hexam's
arrest, and found him drowned, tied to his own boat. The strictly
commercial aspect of the Docks--the London Docks above and the West India
Docks below--shades off by slight degrees into the black misery of the
hole. The warehouses are succeeded by boat-builders' sheds; by private
wharves, where ships, all hidden, as to their hulls, behind walls and
close fences, thrust unexpected bowsprits over the narrow roadway; by
lime-yards; by the shops of marine store-dealers and purveyors to all the
wants and follies of seamen; and then by a variety of strange
establishments which it would be hard to classify.
Close by a yard piled up with crates and barrels of second-hand bottles,
was a large brick warehouse devoted to the purchase and sale of broken
glass. A wagon loaded with that commodity stood before the door, and men
with scoop-shovels were transferring the glass into barrels. An enclosure
of one or two acres, in an out-of-the-way street, might have been the
original of the dust-yard that contained Boffin's Bower, except that
Boffin's Bower was several miles distant, on the northern outskirt of
London. A string of carts, full of miscellaneous street and house rubbish,
all called here by the general name of "dust," were waiting their turn to
discharge. There was a mountain of this refuse at the end of the yard; and
a party of laborers, more or less impeded by two very active black hogs,
were sifting and sorting it. Other mounds, formed from the sittings of the
first, were visible at the sides. There were huge accumulations of broken
crockery and of scraps of tin and other metal, and of bones. There was a
quantity of stable-manure and old straw, and a heap, as large as a
two-story cottage, of old hoops stript from casks and packing-cases. I
never understood, until I looked into this yard, how there could have been
so much value in the dust-mounds at Boffin's Bower.
Gradually the streets became narrower, wetter, dirtier, and poorer.
Hideous little alleys led down to the water's edge where the high tide
splashed over the stone steps. I turned into several of them, and I always
found two or three muddy men lounging at the bottom; often a foul and
furtive boat crept across the field of view. The character of the shops
became more and more difficult to define. Here a window displayed a heap
of sailor's thimbles and pack-thread; there another set forth an array of
trumpery glass vases or a basket of stale fruit, pretexts, perhaps, for
the disguise of a "leaving shop," or unlicensed pawnbroker's
establishment, out of which I expected to see Miss Pleasant Riderhood come
forth, twisting up her back hair as she came. At a place where the houses
ceased, and an open space left free a prospect of the black and
bad-smelling river, there was an old factory, disused and ruined, like the
ancient mill in which Gaffer Hexam made his home, and Lizzie told the
fortunes of her brother in the hollow by the fire.
I turned down a muddy alley, where 12 or 15 placards headed "Body Found,"
were pasted against the wall. They were printed forms, filled in with a
pen. Mr. Forster tells us in his life of Dickens that it was the sight of
bills of this sort which gave the first suggestion of "Our Mutual Friend."
At the end of the alley was a neat brick police-station; stairs led to the
water, and several trim boats were moored there. Within the station I
could see an officer quietly busy at his desk, as if he had been sitting
there ever since Dickens described "the Night Inspector, with a pen and
ink ruler, posting up his books in a whitewashed office as studiously as
if he were in a monastery on the top of a mountain, and no howling fury of
a drunken woman were banging herself against a cell-door in the back yard
at his elbow." A handsome young fellow in uniform, who looked like a cross
between a sailor and a constable, came out and asked very civilly if he
could be of use to me. "Do you know," said I, "where the station was that
Dickens describes in 'Our Mutual Friend'?"
"Oh, yes, sir! this is the very spot. It was the old building that stood
just here: this is a new one, but it has been put up in the same place."
"Mr. Dickens often went out with your men in the boat, didn't he?"
"Yes, sir, many a night in the old times."
"Do you know the tavern which is described in the same book by the name of
The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters?"
"No, sir, I don't know it; at least not by that name. It may have been
pulled down, for a lot of warehouses have been built along here, and the
place is very much changed; or it may be one of those below."
Of course, I chose to think that it must be "one of those below." I kept
on a little farther, by the crooked river lanes, where public houses were
as plentiful as if the entire population suffered from a raging and
inextinguishable thirst for beer. The sign-boards displayed a preference
for the plural which seems not to have escaped the observation of the
novelist. If I did not see The Six Porters, I came across The Three
Mariners, The Three Cups, The Three Suns, The Three Tuns, The Three Foxes,
and the Two Brewers; and in the last I hope that I found the original of
the tavern so often mentioned in the story.
I had first noticed it from the steamboat--"a narrow, lop-sided wooden
jumble of corpulent windows heaped one upon another as you might heap as
many toppling oranges, with a crazy wooden veranda impending over the
water,"--a tavern of dropsical appearance, which had not a straight floor
in its whole constitution, and hardly a straight line. I got at the
entrance on the land side after a search among puzzling alleys, and there
I found still stronger reminders of "Our Mutual Friend." Stuck against the
wall was an array of old and new hand-bills, headed, "Drowned," and
offering rewards for the recovery of bodies. The value set upon dead
persons in Limehouse Hole is not excessive: the customary recompense for
finding them seems to be ten shillings, and in only one instance did the
price reach the dazzling amount of one pound.
By the side of the house is an approach to the river: most of the
buildings near are old and irregular, and at low tide a great deal of the
shore must be exposed. Going upon the slippery stones, beside which lay a
few idle and rickety boats, I found the expected range of windows with
"red curtains matching the noses of the regular customers." I looked in at
the door. A long passage opened a vista of pleasant bar-parlor, or
whatever it may have been, on the river-side; and, perhaps, I should have
seen Miss Abbey Potterson if I had gone to the end. Several water-side
characters were drinking beer at the lead-covered counter, waited upon by
a sharp young woman, who seems to have replaced Bob Gliddery. Instead of
the little room called "Cozy," where the Police Inspector drank burned
sherry with Lightwood and Wrayburn, there was an apartment labelled "The
Club." A party of "regular customers," all evidently connected with water
(or mud), sat around a table: beyond question they were Tootle, and
Mullins, and Bob Glamour, and Captain Joey; and at ten o'clock Miss Abbey
would issue from the bar-parlor, and send them home. If The Jolly
Fellowship Porters is still extant, this must be it.