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Chapter 6
Streets
Should you want to know how to get to the
coffee-house where Mr. Squeers stays when he is in London, Dickens’s nar-
rator will be glad to oblige: from that particularly steep point on Snow Hill,
turn into the coachyard of the Saracen’s Head Inn, noting the booking office
on your left and the spire of St. Sepulchre’s to your right; straight ahead “you
will observe a long window with the words ‘coffee-room’ legibly painted
above it” (NN 4). Or, perhaps you would prefer to get to Mrs. Jellyby’s
house from Lincoln’s Inn: ask Mr. Guppy and he will tell you to “twist up
Chancery Lane, and cut along Holborn, and there we are in four minutes’
time” (BH 4). Fagin’s first den isn’t too hard to find: as you come into Lon-
don through Islington, the Artful Dodger will escort you on St. John’s Road,
making a cut through Sadler’s Wells and down through Exmouth Street and
Coppice Row to Saffron Hill, conveniently located near Smithfield Mar-
ket (O T 8). Later Sikes will drag Oliver westward from Bethnal Green on
their way to the robbery, crossing Finsbury Square to Chiswick Street going
toward Barbican, then into Long Lane on the way to Smithfield, then past
Hyde Park Corner and into Kensington, where they pick up a ride to the
western suburbs (O T 21).
Or, you could get lost in another part of town with Florence Dombey, if
you start at Staggs’s Gardens in Camden Town and take an hour-long detour
to the east along City Road. Somewhere along that road Good Mrs. Brown