Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

Home

It was a Sunday evening in London, gloomy, close, and stale.
Maddening church bells of all degrees of dissonance, sharp and
flat, cracked and clear, fast and slow, made the brick-and-mortar
echoes hideous. Melancholy streets, in a penitential garb of soot,
steeped the souls of the people who were condemned to look at them
out of windows, in dire despondency. In every thoroughfare, up
almost every alley, and down almost every turning, some doleful
bell was throbbing, jerking, tolling, as if the Plague were in the
city and the dead-carts were going round. Everything was bolted
and barred that could by possibility furnish relief to an
overworked people. No pictures, no unfamiliar animals, no rare
plants or flowers, no natural or artificial wonders of the ancient
world--all TABOO with that enlightened strictness, that the ugly
South Sea gods in the British Museum might have supposed themselves
at home again. Nothing to see but streets, streets, streets.
Nothing to breathe but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to
change the brooding mind, or raise it up. Nothing for the spent
toiler to do, but to compare the monotony of his seventh day with
the monotony of his six days, think what a weary life he led, and
make the best of it--or the worst, according to the probabilities.

At such a happy time, so propitious to the interests of religion
and morality, Mr Arthur Clennam, newly arrived from Marseilles by
way of Dover, and by Dover coach the Blue-eyed Maid, sat in the
window of a coffee-house on Ludgate Hill. Ten thousand responsible
houses surrounded him, frowning as heavily on the streets they
composed, as if they were every one inhabited by the ten young men
of the Calender's story, who blackened their faces and bemoaned
their miseries every night. Fifty thousand lairs surrounded him
where people lived so unwholesomely that fair water put into their
crowded rooms on Saturday night, would be corrupt on Sunday
morning; albeit my lord, their county member, was amazed that they
failed to sleep in company with their butcher's meat. Miles of
close wells and pits of houses, where the inhabitants gasped for
air, stretched far away towards every point of the compass.
Through the heart of the town a deadly sewer ebbed and flowed, in
the place of a fine fresh river. What secular want could the
million or so of human beings whose daily labour, six days in the
week, lay among these Arcadian objects, from the sweet sameness of
which they had no escape between the cradle and the grave--what
secular want could they possibly have upon their seventh day?
Clearly they could want nothing but a stringent policeman.

Mr Arthur Clennam sat in the window of the coffee-house on Ludgate