The shops sold goods that only poverty could buy, and sellers and buyers were pinched and griped alike.

Here were poor streets where faded gentility essayed with scanty space and shipwrecked means to make its last feeble stand, but tax-gatherer and creditor came there as elsewhere, and the poverty that yet faintly struggled was hardly less squalid and manifest than that which had long ago submitted and given up the game.
This was a wide, wide track--for the humble followers of the camp of wealth pitch their tents round about it for many a mile--but its character was still the same.

Damp rotten houses, many to let, many yet building, many half-built and mouldering away--lodgings, where it would be hard to tell which needed pity most, those who let or those who came to take--children, scantily fed and clothed, spread over every street, and sprawling in the dust--scolding mothers, stamping their slipshod feet with noisy threats upon the pavement--shabby fathers, hurrying with dispirited looks to the occupation which brought them 'daily bread' and little more--mangling-women, washer-women, cobblers, tailors, chandlers, driving their trades in parlours and kitchens and back room and garrets, and sometimes all of them under the same roof--brick-fields skirting gardens paled with staves of old casks, or timber pillaged from houses burnt down, and blackened and blistered by the flames--mounds of dock-weed, nettles, coarse grass and oyster-shells, heaped in rank confusion--small dissenting chapels to teach, with no lack of illustration, the miseries of Earth, and plenty of new churches, erected with a little superfluous wealth, to show the way to Heaven.
At length these streets becoming more straggling yet, dwindled and dwindled away, until there were only small garden patches bordering the road, with many a summer house innocent of paint and built of old timber or some fragments of a boat, green as the tough cabbage-stalks that grew about it, and grottoed at the seams with toad-stools and tight-sticking snails.

To these succeeded pert cottages, two and two with plots of ground in front, laid out in angular beds with stiff box borders and narrow paths between, where footstep never strayed to make the gravel rough.

Then came the public-house, freshly painted in green and white, with tea-gardens and a bowling green, spurning its old neighbour with the horse-trough where the waggons stopped; then, fields; and then, some houses, one by one, of goodly size with lawns, some even with a lodge where dwelt a porter and his wife.