Penny Blood Serial Fiction — page 101: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

84 THE COURT OF -LONDON crime recruited themselves from day to day, a hideous school of infamy where the preceptors were the wretched children’s own parents? Who can wonder, we again ask, if Newgate, which was so ominously handy, had no fear of finding its felons’ wards and its condemned cells deserted, so long as the low lodging-houses, the boozing-kens, the brothels, the receivers’ and fences’ shops, and all the other dens of iniquity in which Grub Street abounded, flourished in all their fetid and rank luxuriance, — the noxious weeds of the social system. : Reader, take the map of the Great Metropolis, and with “The Mysteries of London ”’ by your side for ready reference, ~ circle with a dark line, either with pen or pencil, each and every loathsome district or neighbourhood which you will find described in the two series of that work or in the one which you are now perusing. Then calculate the proportion which the haunts of crime and the skulking-places of pov- erty bear to the localities where comfort is found or where opulence and splendour reign. The result will prove that two-thirds of the mighty Babylon are.covered with a plague- mist of demoralization, misery, ignorance, wretchedness, squalor, and crime. And yet a thousand towers, pinnacles, and spires point up to heaven, and indicate the houses of God and the temples of worship. Oh, what have the myriad fat and bloated pastors done for the population that swarms in those frightful neighbourhoods? Who can trace in those scenes of depravity the influence of the pulpit, or in those sinks of destitution the beneficence of paternal government? If a missionary of religion be ever encountered in such places, be well assured that he belongs not to the Established Church, which is so extravagantly paid by compulsion, but to the sphere of Dissent, which is sustained by voluntary con- tributions. And, again, if the votary of education be seen amongst the swarming regions of the poor, rest assured that he is no paid emissary of a national system of instruction, but a philanthropist who seeks to impart knowledge on an eleemosynary principle. At the time of which we are writing there were numerous public-houses and boozing-kens of the vilest description in Grub Street; but none was more notorious, with an evil renown, than a certain flash crib denominated the “ Kinchin- Ken.” As its name implied, it was a resort for Juveniles CORNIE OOO KS (E(@) m