Old and new London : a narrative of its history, its people, and its places . ing, from their back doors andwindows, buckets, pails, and domestic utensils in I s^c Vol. v., p. 368. 114 OLD AND NEW LONDON. [Bermondsey. which to haul the water up; and when his eye isturned from these operations to the houses them-selves, his utmost astonishment will be excited bythe scene before him. Crazy wooden galleries,common to the backs of half-a-dozen houses,- withholes from whence to look on the slime beneath;windows, broken and patched, with poles thrustout on which to dry the linen that is never there;
Old and new London : a narrative of its history, its people, and its places . ing, from their back doors andwindows, buckets, pails, and domestic utensils in I s^c Vol. v., p. 368. 114 OLD AND NEW LONDON. [Bermondsey. which to haul the water up; and when his eye isturned from these operations to the houses them-selves, his utmost astonishment will be excited bythe scene before him. Crazy wooden galleries,common to the backs of half-a-dozen houses,- withholes from whence to look on the slime beneath;windows, broken and patched, with poles thrustout on which to dry the linen that is never there;rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air Rough and wild as the spot appears when theditch is filled at high tide, yet, if we visit it sixhours afterwards, when mud usurps the place ofwater, more than one organ of sense is stronglyand unpleasantly appealed to. Wilkinson gave aview of this spot in the Londina Illustrata in theearly part of the present century, and the intervalof time does not seem to have produced muchchange in the appearance of the scene. In the. HALL OF THE SOUTHWARK TRAIN-BANDS, IN 1813. would seem too tainted even for the dirt andsqualor which they shelter; wooden chambersthrusting themselves out above the mud, andthreatening to fall into it, as some of them havedone; dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foun-dations—all these ornament the banks of FollyDitch. This is the scene in the narrow passagesnear the Island, two of which are known by thehumble names of Halfpenny Alley and FarthingAlley. In Jacobs Island itself the warehousesare roofless and empty, the walls are crumblingdown, the windows are now no windows, the doorsare falling into the street, the chimneys are black-ened, but they yield no smoke; and, through lossesand Chancery suits, it is made quite a desolateisland indeed. plate here alluded to, the spectator is supposed tobe standing on Jacobs Island, and looking acrossthe Folly Ditch, to the crazy, ancient houses ofLondon Street. The
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