ROBSON.
In the whole of London there is not a dirtier, narrower, and more
disreputable thoroughfare than Wych Street. It runs from that lowest
part of Drury Lane where Nell Gwyn once had her lodgings, and stood at
her door in very primitive costume to see the milkmaids go a-Maying, and
parallel to Holywell Street and the Strand, into the church-yard of St.
Clements Danes. No good, it was long supposed, could ever come out of
Wych Street. The place had borne an evil name for centuries. Up a
horrible little court branching northward from it good old George
Cruikshank once showed me the house where Jack Sheppard, the robber and
prison-breaker, served his apprenticeship to Mr. Wood, the carpenter;
and on a beam in the loft of this house Jack is said to have carved his
name. When the pavement of the Strand is under repair, Wych Street
becomes, perforce, the principal channel of communication between the
east and the west end; and Theodore Hook used to say that he never
passed through Wych Street in a hackney-coach without being blocked up
by a hearse and a coal-wagon in the van, and a mud-cart and the Lord
Mayor's carriage in the rear. Wych Street is among the highways we
English are ashamed to show to foreigners. We have threatened to pull it
down bodily, any time these two hundred years, and a portion of the
southern side, on which the old Lyons Inn abutted, has indeed been
razed, preparatory to the erection of a grand metropolitan hotel on the
American system; but the funds appear not to be forthcoming; the scheme
languishes; and, on the other side of the street, another legal
hostelry, New Inn, still flourishes in weedy dampness, immovable in the
strength of vested interests.
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