(continued)
(d) “An 1865 cartoon, ‘Scene in Regent Street,’ shows a clergyman thrusting a moralizing tract at a fashionably dressed woman. She replies, ‘Bless me, Sir . . . I am not a social evil, I'm only waiting for a bus.’”
(i) Regent Street
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regent_Street
(named after the Prince Regent (later George IV) [because his father George III had dementia])
(ii) tract = pamphlet
(e) “Some things may have changed, but it comes as no surprise to learn that even in Dickens's day the city's taxis [there was no automobile then]—known as ‘growlers’ for the bad temper of their drivers—were notorious for their scruffy state. * * * ‘the check-string, used to tell the driver to stop, never worked.’ * * * He [Dickens] recalled that he once saw ‘a hat box, a portmanteau, and a carpet-bag’ strewn along Holborn and Fleet Street, and on asking if anyone was injured, was given the reassuring reply, ‘O'ny the fare [ie, passenger], sir.’"
(i) check-string (n): "a string by which the occupant of a carriage may attract the driver's notice"
Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary
www.finedictionary.com/Check-string.html
(ii)
(A) portmanteau (n; French): "a large suitcase"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/portmanteau
(B) Portmanteau (luggage)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau_(luggage)
(f) “Jacob's Island, as Dickens wrote in ‘Oliver Twist’ (1838), was a warren of ‘crazy wooden galleries’ hanging over a stagnant ditch filled with the effluent from the nearby tanneries.”
(i) Jacob's Island
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob's_Island
(was immortalised by Charles Dickens's novel Oliver Twist [published in 1838; protagonist was an orphan boy named Oliver Twist])
(ii) The following explains why it is called an island (because ditches were dug around the neighborhood). “Jacob”? Not explained.
Jacon's Island
www.hsomerville.com/meccano/Articles/JacobsIsland.htm
("As an ‘island,’ it was man-made. Local maps place its date of creation between 1660 and 1680, the first 20 years of the reign of Charles II, when the tidal ditches surrounding and intersecting the island were dug")
View a map in the Web page, with a red rectangular boundary.
(g) “Waste was pumped unchecked into the Thames: As Dickens chided in ‘Little Dorrit’ (1857), ‘Through the heart of the town a deadly sewer ebbed and flowed, instead of a fine, fresh river.’
Little Dorrit
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Dorrit
, where Dorrit is the last name of a character.
(h) “Green spaces were gradually made available to the masses in the form of the great parks, such as Victoria and Finsbury, which are a feature of the modern London landscape. Piccadilly Circus, a plaza that is now a byword for traffic jams and breakneck driving, was originally created to give Regent Street a more countrified feel. * * * Nelson's Column was a design decision arrived at after considerable wrangling: Earlier suggestions, mercifully rejected, had included a 90-foot trident. Predictably, the tall, thin colonnade with its famous statue on top was immediately derided as a disaster (columns were supposed to support buildings, not statues, the reasoning went) and even Nelson's two-cornered hat was criticized as uncharacteristic. Today, Nelson's hat is his most recognizable feature.”
(i) Finsbury
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finsbury
(section 1 Etymology)
(ii) Piccadilly Circus
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piccadilly_Circus
Rad paragraph 1 only.
(iii) circus (n; Middle English, from Latin [noun masculine: circus], circle, circus):
“British : a usually circular area at an intersection of streets”
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/circus
(iv) Compare
(A) Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Nelson,_1st_Viscount_Nelson
with (B) tricorne
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricorne
(I) "’The Victorian City’ is the perfect companion to Dickens's work. It is not necessary to be familiar with his novels in order to savor this portrait of the 19th-century metropolis in all its odoriferous particularity—the cress-sellers and the costermongers, the brothels and gin palaces, the scaffolding and slaughterhouses.”
(i) odoriferous (adj): “yielding an odor: ODOROUS”
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/odoriferous
(ii) garden cress
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_cress
(Lepidium sativum)
(iii) costermonger (n; from COSTARD [a kind of apple] + MONGER): "(British, rare) a person who sells fruit, vegetables, etc, from a barrow"
www.collinsdictionary.com/dictio ... owCookiePolicy=true
(iv) gin palace
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gin_palace
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