Nothing of the kind. There were no public
buildings of any sort; no churches, chapels, town-hall,
institute, theatre; and the principal streets in the heart of
the town in which were situate the coarse and grimy shops,
though formed by houses of a greater elevation than the
preceding, were equally narrow and if possible more dirty. At
every fourth or fifth house, alleys seldom above a yard wide
and streaming with filth, opened out of the street. These
were crowded with dwellings of various size, while from the
principal court often branched out a number of smaller alleys
or rather narrow passages, than which nothing can be conceived
more close and squalid and obscure. Here during the days of
business, the sound of the hammer and the file never ceased,
amid gutters of abomination and piles of foulness and stagnant
pools of filth; reservoirs of leprosy and plague, whose
exhalations were sufficient to taint the atmosphere of the
whole kingdom and fill the country with fever and pestilence.
A lank and haggard youth, ricketty and smoke-dried, and black
with his craft, was sitting on the threshold of a miserable
hovel and working at the file. Behind him stood a stunted and
meagre girl, with a back like a grasshopper; a deformity
occasioned by the displacement of the bladebone, and prevalent
among the girls of Wodgate from the cramping posture of their
usual toil.
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