The blacking-warehouse at Old Hungerford Stairs, Strand, in which Charles Dickens was shown by Bob Fagin how to tie up the pots of paste, has rotted down and been carted away.  The coal-barges in the muddy river are still there, just as they were when Charles, Poll Green and Bob Fagin played on them during the dinner-hour.  I saw Bob and several other boys, grimy with blacking, chasing each other across the flatboats, but Dickens was not there.

Down the river aways there is a crazy, old warehouse with a rotten wharf of its own, abutting on the water when the tide is in, and on the mud when the tide is out—­the whole place literally overrun with rats that scuffle and squeal on the moldy stairs.  I asked Bobby if it could not be that this was the blacking-factory; but he said, No, for this one allus wuz.

Dickens found lodgings in Lant Street while his father was awaiting in the Marshalsea for something to turn up.  Bob Sawyer afterward had the same quarters.  When Sawyer invited Mr. Pickwick “and the other chaps” to dine with him, he failed to give his number, so we can not locate the house.  But I found the street and saw a big, wooden Pickwick on wheels standing as a sign for a tobacco-shop.  The old gentleman who runs the place, and runs the sign in every night, assured me that Bob Sawyer’s room was the first floor back.  I looked in at it, but seeing no one there whom I knew, I bought tuppence worth of pigtail in lieu of fee, and came away.

If a man wished to abstract himself from the world, to remove himself from temptation, to place himself beyond the possibility of desire to look out of the window, he should live in Lant Street, said a great novelist.  David Copperfield lodged here when he ordered that glass of Genuine Stunning Ale at the Red Lion and excited the sympathy of the landlord, winning a motherly kiss from his wife.

The Red Lion still crouches (under another name) at the corner of Derby and Parliament Streets, Westminster.  I daydreamed there for an hour one morning, pretending the while to read a newspaper.  I can not, however, recommend their ale as particularly stunning.

As there are authors of one book, so are there readers of one author—­more than we wist.  Children want the same bear story over and over, preferring it to a new one; so “grown-ups” often prefer the dog-eared book to uncut leaves.

Mr. Hawkins preferred the dog-eared, and at the station-house, where many times he had long hours to wait in anticipation of a hurry-up call, he whiled away the time by browsing in his Dickens.  He knew no other author, neither did he wish to.  His epidermis was soaked with Dickensology, and when inspired by gin and bitters he emitted information at every pore.  To him all these bodiless beings of Dickens’ brain were living creatures.  An anachronism was nothing to Hawkins.  Charley Bates was still at large, Quilp was just around the corner, and Gaffer Hexam’s boat was moored in the muddy river below.