My day's no-business beckoning me to the East-end of London, I had turned my face to
that point of the metropolitan compass on leaving Covent-garden, and had got past the
India House, thinking in my idle manner of Tippoo-Sahib and Charles Lamb, and had got
past my little wooden midshipman, after affectionately patting him on one leg of his
knee-shorts for old acquaintance' sake, and had got past Aldgate Pump, and had got past
the Saracen's Head (with an ignominious rash of posting bills disfiguring his swarthy
countenance), and had strolled up the empty yard of his ancient neighbour the Black or
Blue Boar, or Bull, who departed this life I don't know when, and whose coaches are all
gone I don't know where; and I had come out again into the age of railways, and I had got
past Whitechapel Church, and was - rather inappropriately for an Uncommercial
Traveller - in the Commercial Road. Pleasantly wallowing in the abundant mud of that
thoroughfare, and greatly enjoying the huge piles of building belonging to the sugar
refiners, the little masts and vanes in small back gardens in back streets, the neighbouring
canals and docks, the India vans lumbering along their stone tramway, and the
pawnbrokers' shops where hard-up Mates had pawned so many sextants and quadrants,
that I should have bought a few cheap if I had the least notion how to use them, I at last
began to file off to the right, towards Wapping.
Not that I intended to take boat at Wapping Old Stairs, or that I was going to look at the
locality, because I believe (for I don't) in the constancy of the young woman who told her
sea-going lover, to such a beautiful old tune, that she had ever continued the same, since
she gave him the 'baccer-box marked with his name; I am afraid he usually got the worst
of those transactions, and was frightfully taken in. No, I was going to Wapping, because
an Eastern police magistrate had said, through the morning papers, that there was no
classification at the Wapping workhouse for women, and that it was a disgrace and a
shame, and divers other hard names, and because I wished to see how the fact really
stood. For, that Eastern police magistrates are not always the wisest men of the East, may
be inferred from their course of procedure respecting the fancy-dressing and pantomime-
posturing at St. George's in that quarter: which is usually, to discuss the matter at issue, in
a state of mind betokening the weakest perplexity, with all parties concerned and
unconcerned, and, for a final expedient, to consult the complainant as to what he thinks
ought to be done with the defendant, and take the defendant's opinion as to what he
would recommend to be done with himself.
Long before I reached Wapping, I gave myself up as having lost my way, and,
abandoning myself to the narrow streets in a Turkish frame of mind, relied on
predestination to bring me somehow or other to the place I wanted if I were ever to get
there. When I had ceased for an hour or so to take any trouble about the matter, I found
myself on a swing-bridge looking down at some dark locks in some dirty water. Over
against me, stood a creature remotely in the likeness of a young man, with a puffed
sallow face, and a figure all dirty and shiny and slimy, who may have been the youngest
son of his filthy old father, Thames, or the drowned man about whom there was a placard
on the granite post like a large thimble, that stood between us.
