By George Gissing

(_Human Odds and Ends/Stories and Sketches_, London: Lawrence and Bullen
Ltd, 1898)


The ordinary West-End Londoner--who is a citizen of no city at all, but
dwells amid a mere conglomerate of houses at a certain distance from
Charing Cross--has known a fleeting surprise when, by rare chance, his
eye fell upon the name of some such newspaper as the _Battersea Times_,
the _Camberwell Mercury_, or the _Islington Gazette_. To him, these and
the like districts are nothing more than compass points of the huge
metropolis. He may be in practice acquainted with them; if historically
inclined, he may think of them as old-time villages swallowed up by
insatiable London; but he has never grasped the fact that in Battersea,
Camberwell, Islington, there are people living who name these places as
their home; who are born, subsist, and die there as though in a distinct
town, and practically without consciousness of its obliteration in the
map of a world capital.

The stable element of this population consists of more or less
old-fashioned people. Round about them is the ceaseless coming and going
of nomads who keep abreast with the time, who take their lodgings by the
week, their houses by the month; who camp indifferently in regions old
and new, learning their geography in train and tram-car. Abiding
parishioners are wont to be either very poor or established in a
moderate prosperity; they lack enterprise, either for good or ill: if
comfortably off, they owe it, as a rule, to some predecessor's exertion.
And for the most part, though little enough endowed with the civic