Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

Of Mr Ralph Nickleby, and his Establishments, and his Undertakings,
and of a great Joint Stock Company of vast national Importance

Mr Ralph Nickleby was not, strictly speaking, what you would call a
merchant, neither was he a banker, nor an attorney, nor a special
pleader, nor a notary. He was certainly not a tradesman, and still
less could he lay any claim to the title of a professional
gentleman; for it would have been impossible to mention any
recognised profession to which he belonged. Nevertheless, as he
lived in a spacious house in Golden Square, which, in addition to a
brass plate upon the street-door, had another brass plate two sizes
and a half smaller upon the left hand door-post, surrounding a brass
model of an infant's fist grasping a fragment of a skewer, and
displaying the word 'Office,' it was clear that Mr Ralph Nickleby
did, or pretended to do, business of some kind; and the fact, if it
required any further circumstantial evidence, was abundantly
demonstrated by the diurnal attendance, between the hours of half-
past nine and five, of a sallow-faced man in rusty brown, who sat
upon an uncommonly hard stool in a species of butler's pantry at the
end of the passage, and always had a pen behind his ear when he
answered the bell.

Although a few members of the graver professions live about Golden
Square, it is not exactly in anybody's way to or from anywhere. It
is one of the squares that have been; a quarter of the town that has
gone down in the world, and taken to letting lodgings. Many of its
first and second floors are let, furnished, to single gentlemen; and
it takes boarders besides. It is a great resort of foreigners. The
dark-complexioned men who wear large rings, and heavy watch-guards,
and bushy whiskers, and who congregate under the Opera Colonnade,
and about the box-office in the season, between four and five in the
afternoon, when they give away the orders,--all live in Golden
Square, or within a street of it. Two or three violins and a wind
instrument from the Opera band reside within its precincts. Its
boarding-houses are musical, and the notes of pianos and harps float
in the evening time round the head of the mournful statue, the
guardian genius of a little wilderness of shrubs, in the centre of
the square. On a summer's night, windows are thrown open, and
groups of swarthy moustached men are seen by the passer-by, lounging
at the casements, and smoking fearfully. Sounds of gruff voices
practising vocal music invade the evening's silence; and the fumes
of choice tobacco scent the air. There, snuff and cigars, and
German pipes and flutes, and violins and violoncellos, divide the
supremacy between them. It is the region of song and smoke. Street