It is the thieves that make the place, not the
place the thieves. Who offers to build a new
Fleet Prison, now arrest on mesne process is
abolished? Is not Traitors' Gate bricked up
now that acts of attainder are passed no more?
Would not the Lord Mayor's state coach be
broken up and sold for old rubbish a month
after the last Lord Mayoralty? There would
be no need for such a place as Gibbet Street,
if there were no thieves to dwell in it; but
as long as you go hammering parchment
act-of-parliament-drums, and beating up for
recruits for Satan's Light-fingered Brigade,
so long will the Gibbet Street barracks be
open, and the Gibbet Street billeting system
flourish.

Near a shabby market, full of damaged
vegetable stuff, hedged in by gin-shops—a
narrow, slimy, ill-paved, ill-smelling, worse-
looking street, the majority of the houses
private (!) but with a sprinkling of marine-
stores, rag shops, chandlers' and fried-fish
warehouses, low-browed, doorless doorways
leading to black rotten staircases, or to tainted
backyards, where corruption sits on the water-
butt, and fever lives like a house-dog in
the dust-bin: with shattered windows, the
majority of them open with a sort of
desperate resolve on the part of the wretched
inmates to clutch at least some wandering
fragment of pure light and air: this is
Gibbet Street. Who said (and said wisely,
and beautifully too), that a sun-beam passes
through pollution unpolluted? It cannot
be true, here, in this abandoned place. If
a sunbeam could permeate into the den, I
verily believe it would be tarnished and would
smell foully before it had searched into the
abyss of all this vapour of decay. What
manner of men, save thieves, and what
manner of women save drudges, bond-
servants, yet loving help-mates to their
brutal mates, live here? It would be
wholesome and profitable for those young
ladies and gentlemen who imagine even the
modern thief to be a rake, bejewelled, broad-
clothed, with his brougham, his park hack
and his seraglio, to come and dwell here in
Gibbet Street. Ask the police (when they
are assured they have a sensible man to deal
with, they tell him the plain truth), ask astute
Superintendent X, practical Inspector Z,
where the swell mob is to be found. They
will laugh at you, and tell you that there
is no swell mob, now. Well-dressed
thieves there are of course; robbers on
a great scale; well-educated men of the
world; cautious; who live by themselves, or
in twos or threes, and in luxury. But the
thief, genetically speaking, is an ignorant,
coarse, brutalised, simple-minded
spendthrift, in spite of his thievish cunning. He
is always hiding his head in the sand, like
the imbecile ostrich; coming back to hide
where there is no concealment, in Gibbet
Street after a great robbery, and pounced
upon immediately by X the astute, or Z
the practical. The thief is recklessly
improvident. His net earnings, like the receipts
of an usurer-ridden prodigal are infinitesimally
small in proportion to his gross plunder.
The thieves' and leaving shops are his bill-
discounters. He gorges tripe, and clods, and
stickings. He is drunk with laudanumed beer
and turpentined gin. He pays five hundred
per cent. excess for his lodging, his raiment,
and his food. He is robbed by his
comrades; for there is not always honour among
thieves. He is as often obliged to thieve
for his daily bread, as for the means of
indulging his profligacy. There is no work
so hard as thieving. Hours of patient watching,
waiting, marching, countermarching,
flight, skulking, exposure and fatigue have
to be passed, for often a reward of three-
halfpence. The thieve's nerves are always
strung to the highest degree of tension; he
has no holidays; he is always running
away from somebody; always seeking or
being sought. The thief is as a man afflicted
with a mortal disease. Like a person with
disease of the heart, who knows that some
day he will stagger and fall, the thief knows
he has the great gallows aneurism; that
the apoplexy of arrest must come upon him.
He knows not when. He gets drunk
sometimes and forgets the skeleton; but he knows
it must come some day—a skeleton with
a glazed hat, a number and letter on his
collar, and handcuffs in his pocket.

You need no further picture of Gibbet
Street. Walk twenty yards and you can
see the place itself—the stones, the gutters,
the rags that hang out like banners; and the
wretched, pale-faced population: some men's
faces swollen by liquor, and some women's
from bruises, and some women and men's
from both. It is safe enough to go
down Gibbet Street in the day-time—at least
you are safe enough from personal violence.
If you are well-dressed, of course you will
be robbed; but, at night, you had better avoid
it, though policemen patrol it, and the
carriages of the nobility and gentry, who are
patronising the theatres, are sometimes
stationary at its upper entrance.

I have been acquainted with this
Tartarus these dozen years; and, although I
am a professional town traveller, and have
frequented, of malice prepense, the lowest
haunts of some European capitals, I never
bestowed much notice upon Gibbet Street.
I took it for granted as an abode of thieves,
glanced curiously at its low-browed, bull-
necked, thick-lipped inhabitants, and
buttoned up my coat pockets when I was
obliged to pass through it. Lately, however,
it so happened, that Gibbet Street and I have
been nearer acquaintances; and, curiously,
my more intimate knowledge of this home
of dishonesty has been due to the fine arts.

My friend Poundbrush—that celebrated
but unassuming artist—paints Grecian
temples, Egyptian pyramids, Oriental kiosks,