The journey through Lambeth, Vauxhall, and Queen’s Road is not calculated to give the intelligent foreigner a particularly favourable impression of London.  Still M. Zola did not at first find the surroundings very much worse than those one observes on leaving Paris by the Northern or Eastern lines.  But as the train went on and on and much the same scene appeared on either hand he began to wonder when it would all end.

On approaching Clapham Junction a sea of roofs is to be seen on the right stretching away through Battersea to the Thames; while on the left a huge wave of houses ascends the acclivity known, I believe, as Lavender Hill.  And at the sight of all the mean, dusty streets, lined with little houses of uniform pattern, each close pressed to the other—­at the frequently recurring glimpses of squalor and shabby gentility—­M.  Zola exploded.

‘It is awful!’ he said.

We were alone in our compartment, and he looked first from one window and then from the other.  Next came a torrent of questions:  Why were the houses so small?  Why were they all so ugly and so much alike?  What classes of people lived in them?  Why were the roads so dusty?  Why was there such a litter of fragments of paper lying about everywhere?  Where those streets never watered?  Was there no scavengers’ service?  And then a remark:  ’You see that house, it looks fairly clean and neat in front.  But there!  Look at the back-yard—­all rubbish and poverty!  One notices that again and again!’

We passed Clapham Junction, pursuing our journey through the cutting which intersects Wandsworth Common.  ‘Well,’ I said, ’you may take it that, except as regards the postal and police services, you are now out of London proper.’

Presently, indeed, we emerged from the cutting, and fields were seen on either hand.  One could breathe at last.  But as we approached Earlsfield Station all M. Zola’s attention was given to a long row of low-lying houses whose yards and gardens extend to the railway line.  Now and again a trim patch of ground was seen; here, too, there was a little glass-house, there an attempt at an arbour.  But litter and rubbish were only too often apparent.

‘This, I suppose,’ said the novelist, ’is what you call a London slum invading the country?  You tell me that only a part of the bourgeoisie cares for flats, and that among the lower middle class and the working class each family prefers to rent its own little house.  Is this for the sake of privacy?  If so, I see no privacy here.  Leaving out the question of being overlooked from passing trains, observe the open four-foot fences which separate one garden or yard from the other.  There is no privacy at all!  To me the manner in which your poorer classes are housed in the suburbs, packed closely together in flimsy buildings, where every sound can be heard, suggests a form of socialism—­communism, or perhaps rather the phalansterian system.’