Charles Dickens: The Old Curiosity Shop

CHAPTER 15 (continued)

This quarter passed, they came upon the haunts of commerce and great traffic, where many people were resorting, and business was already rife. The old man looked about him with a startled and bewildered gaze, for these were places that he hoped to shun. He pressed his finger on his lip, and drew the child along by narrow courts and winding ways, nor did he seem at ease until they had left it far behind, often casting a backward look towards it, murmuring that ruin and self-murder were crouching in every street, and would follow if they scented them; and that they could not fly too fast.

Again this quarter passed, they came upon a straggling neighbourhood, where the mean houses parcelled off in rooms, and windows patched with rags and paper, told of the populous poverty that sheltered there. The shops sold goods that only poverty could buy, and sellers and buyers were pinched and griped alike. Here were poor streets where faded gentility essayed with scanty space and shipwrecked means to make its last feeble stand, but tax-gatherer and creditor came there as elsewhere, and the poverty that yet faintly struggled was hardly less squalid and manifest than that which had long ago submitted and given up the game.

This was a wide, wide track--for the humble followers of the camp of wealth pitch their tents round about it for many a mile--but its character was still the same. Damp rotten houses, many to let, many yet building, many half-built and mouldering away--lodgings, where it would be hard to tell which needed pity most, those who let or those who came to take--children, scantily fed and clothed, spread over every street, and sprawling in the dust--scolding mothers, stamping their slipshod feet with noisy threats upon the pavement--shabby fathers, hurrying with dispirited looks to the occupation which brought them 'daily bread' and little more-- mangling-women, washer-women, cobblers, tailors, chandlers, driving their trades in parlours and kitchens and back room and garrets, and sometimes all of them under the same roof-- brick-fields skirting gardens paled with staves of old casks, or timber pillaged from houses burnt down, and blackened and blistered by the flames--mounds of dock-weed, nettles, coarse grass and oyster-shells, heaped in rank confusion--small dissenting chapels to teach, with no lack of illustration, the miseries of Earth, and plenty of new churches, erected with a little superfluous wealth, to show the way to Heaven.