Surely there never was, in any other borough¹, city, or hamlet in the world, such a singular sort of a place as Todgers’s. And surely London, to judge from that part of it which hemmed² Todgers’s round and hustled³ it, and crushed it, and stuck its brick-and-mortar elbows into it, and kept the air from it, and stood perpetually between it and the light, was worthy⁴ of Todgers’s, and qualified⁵ to be on terms of close relationship and alliance with hundreds and thousands of the odd family to which Todgers’s belonged.

You couldn’t walk about Todgers’s neighbourhood, as you could in any other neighbourhood. You groped your way for an hour through lanes and byways, and court-yards, and passages; and you never once emerged upon anything that might be reasonably called a street. A kind of resigned distraction⁷ came over the stranger as he trod those devious⁸ mazes⁹, and, giving himself up for lost, went in and out and round about and quietly turned back again when he came to a dead wall or was stopped by an iron railing, and felt that the means of escape might possibly present themselves in their own good time, but that to anticipate them was hopeless. Instances were known of people who, being asked to dine at Todgers’s, had travelled round and round for a weary time, with its very chimney-pots in view; and finding it, at last, impossible of attainment¹⁰, had gone home again with a gentle melancholy¹¹ on their spirits,

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