"It was the most
noisome quarter of
London, where
everything wore the worst impress of the most deplorable poverty, and of the most desperate crime. By the dim
light of an
accidental lamp, tall, antique, worm-eaten, wooden tenements were seen tottering to their fall, in
directions so many and
capricious that
scarce the semblance of a
passage was discernible
between them. The
paving-stones lay at
random, displaced from their beds by the
rankly-growing grass. Horrible
filth festered in the dammed-up gutters. The whole atmosphere teemed with
desolation. Yet, as we
proceeded, the sounds of
human life revived by sure degrees, and at
length large bands of the most abandoned of a
London populace were seen reeling to and fro. The spirits of the
old man again flickered up, as a lamp which is near its
death-hour. Once more he strode onward with
elastic tread. Suddenly a
corner was turned, a blaze of
light burst upon our sight, and we
stood before one of the huge
suburban temples of Intemperance -- one of the palaces of the fiend,
Gin."
Edgar Allan Poe, "The Man of the Crowd," in
Tales of Mystery and Imagination, London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1912, 108.
