Chapter 4

CHAPTER 4

Nicholas and his Uncle (to secure the Fortune without loss of time)
wait upon Mr Wackford Squeers, the Yorkshire Schoolmaster

Snow Hill! What kind of place can the quiet townspeople who see the
words emblazoned, in all the legibility of gilt letters and dark
shading, on the north-country coaches, take Snow Hill to be? All
people have some undefined and shadowy notion of a place whose name
is frequently before their eyes, or often in their ears. What a
vast number of random ideas there must be perpetually floating
about, regarding this same Snow Hill. The name is such a good one.
Snow Hill--Snow Hill too, coupled with a Saracen's Head: picturing
to us by a double association of ideas, something stern and rugged!
A bleak desolate tract of country, open to piercing blasts and
fierce wintry storms--a dark, cold, gloomy heath, lonely by day, and
scarcely to be thought of by honest folks at night--a place which
solitary wayfarers shun, and where desperate robbers congregate;--
this, or something like this, should be the prevalent notion of Snow
Hill, in those remote and rustic parts, through which the Saracen's
Head, like some grim apparition, rushes each day and night with
mysterious and ghost-like punctuality; holding its swift and
headlong course in all weathers, and seeming to bid defiance to the
very elements themselves.

The reality is rather different, but by no means to be despised
notwithstanding. There, at the very core of London, in the heart of
its business and animation, in the midst of a whirl of noise and
motion: stemming as it were the giant currents of life that flow
ceaselessly on from different quarters, and meet beneath its walls:
stands Newgate; and in that crowded street on which it frowns so
darkly--within a few feet of the squalid tottering houses--upon the
very spot on which the vendors of soup and fish and damaged fruit
are now plying their trades--scores of human beings, amidst a roar
of sounds to which even the tumult of a great city is as nothing,
four, six, or eight strong men at a time, have been hurried
violently and swiftly from the world, when the scene has been
rendered frightful with excess of human life; when curious eyes have
glared from casement and house-top, and wall and pillar; and when,
in the mass of white and upturned faces, the dying wretch, in his
all-comprehensive look of agony, has met not one--not one--that bore
the impress of pity or compassion.

Near to the jail, and by consequence near to Smithfield also, and
the Compter, and the bustle and noise of the city; and just on that
particular part of Snow Hill where omnibus horses going eastward
seriously think of falling down on purpose, and where horses in
hackney