GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA,
THE AUTHOR OF “TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK.”
TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK;
OR THE
HOURS OF THE DAY AND NIGHT
IN LONDON.
BY
GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA,
AUTHOR OF “A JOURNEY DUE NORTH,” “GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT,” ETC. ETC.
ILLUSTRATED WITH
A PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR, AND NUMEROUS ENGRAVINGS ON WOOD,
FROM DRAWINGS BY WILLIAM M’CONNEL.
LONDON:
RICHARD MARSH, 122, FLEET STREET.
1862.
TO AUGUSTUS MAYHEW.
Had I not fifty other valid reasons—did I not feel myself impelled tosuch a course by the long years of affectionate intercourse which havecast sunshine on that highway of life, of which the shadier side of theroad has been apportioned to me, I should still, my dear Augustus,dedicate this book to you. I could show, I hope, my affection andesteem in other ways; but to address to you the Epistle Dedicatory of“Twice Round the Clock” is only your due, in justice and in courtesy.Civility is not so common a quality among the Eminent BritishAuthors of the day, and mutual admiration is not so plentifully displayedby our Fieldings and Smolletts of 1859, that we middling andmiddle-class ink-spillers can afford to throw away a chance of sayinga kind or civil thing to one another in the right way and in the rightplace. Do you, therefore, say something neat and complimentary aboutme in the preface to your next book; and I only trust that the taskwill confer as sincere a pleasure on you as it confers on me at thismoment.
But I might still, I must admit, admire you very much, withoutthat admiration giving you a Right to the Dedication of a Book relatingexclusively to London Life and London Manners in the nineteenthcentury. Herein, however, rests, I think, your claim: That you arethe author of a capital book called “Paved with Gold,” replete with[vi]the finest and shrewdest observation drawn from the scenes we haveboth delighted to survey, to study, and to describe, and of which book,although the basis was romantic fiction, the numerous episodes werepicturesque but eminently faithful photographs of fact. I should haveliked, myself, to tell the story of a prize fight, of a ratting match, orof a boy’s low lodging-house, in my own way, and in these pages; butI shrank from the attempt after your graphic narratives in “Pavedwith Gold.” And, again, have you not been for years the fellow-labourerof your brother Henry, in those deeply-tinted but unalterably-veraciousstudies of London Life, of which we have the resultsin “Labour and the Poor” and in the “Great World of London?”Of how many prisons, workhouses, factories, work-rooms, have younot told the tale? of how many dramas of misery and poverty have younot been the chronicler? Let us bow to the great ones of letters