warehouses each rejoicing in a plurality of
stories, with gaping doors where there should
be windows, and huge cranes from which perpetually
balance sacks of meal or hogsheads
of sugar after the manner of Mahomet's coffin
—creates in the mind of the London-bred
Islingtonian a curious dissociation of ideas.
And when he comes upon a Grosvenor Street
in the guise of a blind alley, or upon a Holborn
fringed with pretty suburban villas, or a
Piccadilly next to a range of pigsties, or a
Fleet Street planted with flowering shrubs, he
cannot fail to doubt whether a street is still
a street "for a' that."

These topographical incongruities have
lately been brought under my notice in the
great commercial port of Liverpool. In
Liverpool, which can show its suburbs and
dependencies included a population not
much under four hundred thousand souls, I
found Pall Malls, Fleet Streets, Covent Gardens,
Drury Lanes, Houndsditches, Islingtons,
and other places all with London names,
and all with a most opinionated want of
resemblance to their London sponsors. Islington,
I found to be not a district, but a single
street, the site of several public-houses, one or
two pawnbrokers', and numerous chandlers'
shops. Fleet Street is without bustle, Drury
Lane without dirt, and Covent Garden without
an apple or an orange. Park Lane—the
very sound of which is suggestive of curly-wigged
coachmen, high-stepping carriage-horses,
(jobbed mostly; but such is life)
silver-studded harness, luxurious carriages
hung on feathery springs, ostrich feathers,
diamonds, Danish dogs, blue ribbons, the
ladies' mile, the Grenadier Guards, and
the Duke of Somerset's coronet-tipped gas-lamps;
the whole pomp, pride, and circumstance
of our glorious aristocracy—Park
Lane I found to be filled with shops,
pavement, and population; and devoted to
the vending of marine stores, the purveying
of fiery gin, the receipt of miscellaneous
articles in pledge, and the boarding, lodging,
and fleecing—with a little hocussing, crimping,
and kidnapping included—of those who go
down to the sea in ships: in short, a West
Coast Wapping.

There is, however, no rule without an
exception; and I came ultimately upon a
street, which, albeit possessing certain originalities
of aspect and existence not to be
found elsewhere, did nevertheless offer in its
general character something approaching a
resemblance to the London highway from
which it has drawn its name. Whoever
built this street was evidently a man impressed
with a sufficient idea of the general fitness of
things. He must have been a travelled, or
at least, a well-read man; and he evidently
had a keen remembrance of that great London
artery which stretches from Aldgate Pump
to Mile End Gate, London, when he called
that Liverpool street Whitechapel.

I am thankful to him for having done so;
for had the Liverpool Whitechapel not resembled
in some measure the London Whitechapel,
and thereby become exceptional,
I should—having walked Down Whitechapel.
Way,* in London, one Saturday night in
eighteen hundred and fifty-one — not have
walked down this Whitechapel Way (two
hundred and twenty miles away) one Saturday
night in eighteen hundred and
fifty-three.

Whitechapel in Lancashire is so far like
Whitechapel in Middlesex, that it is passably
dirty, moderately thronged by day, and inconveniently
crowded by night ; is resorted to by
a variety of persons of a suspicious nature,
and by a considerable number about whom
there can be no suspicion at all: that, more-ever,
it has a kerb-stone market for the
negociation of fruit and small ware: that it
is scoured by flying tribes of Bedouins, in the
guise of peripatetic street vendors; that it
is sprinkled with cheap tailoring establishments,
cheap eating and coffee houses, cheap
places of public amusement; and finally,
that it is glutted with gin palaces, whiskey
shops, taverns, and public-houses of every
description.

Thus far, the two streets run in concert;
but they soon diverge. The Liverpool Whitechapel
is intensely maritime (or what I may
call " Dockish "), intensely Hibernian—in its
offshoots or side-streets almost wholly so—
intensely commercial, and, during the daytime,
not wholly unaristocratic; for it is
intersected in one part by Church Street, the
Eden of the haberdashers' shops and the pet
promenade of the beauty and fashion of the
City of the Liver. Lord Street the proud
branches off from it, full of grand shops, and
the pavement of which is daily trodden by
those interesting specimens of humanity,
"hundred thousand pound men: " humble-minded
millionnaires who disdain carriages in
business hours, and in the humility of their
wealth, condescend to pop at stray times
into quaint little taverns, where they joke
with the landlady, and ask for the " Mail " or
the " Mercury " after you have done with it,
as though they were nothing more than
wharfingers or entering clerks. Nor are
these all the high connections Whitechapel
in Liverpool can claim. At the upper end
branches off a short thoroughfare, leading
into Dale Street, likewise patronised by the
magnates of Liverpool. At its extreme end
again is the confluence of streets abutting
on the stately London and North-Western
Terminus in Lime Street, and on the great
open space, where stands that really magnificent
building, St. George's Hall. The
consequence of all this is that there is a constant
cross-stream of fashionables mingling
with the rushing river of the profanum
vulgus.

It is half-past ten o'clock; for the early

* See Household Words vol. iv.. p. 126.