Snow Hill! What kind of place can the quiet townspeople who see the
words emblazoned, in all the legibility of gilt letters and dark
shading, on the north-country coaches, take Snow Hill to be? All
people have some undefined and shadowy notion of a place whose name is
frequently before their eyes, or often in their ears. What a vast number
of random ideas there must be perpetually floating about, regarding this
same Snow Hill. The name is such a good one. Snow Hill--Snow Hill too,
coupled with a Saracen's Head: picturing to us by a double association
of ideas, something stern and rugged! A bleak desolate tract of country,
open to piercing blasts and fierce wintry storms--a dark, cold, gloomy
heath, lonely by day, and scarcely to be thought of by honest folks
at night--a place which solitary wayfarers shun, and where desperate
robbers congregate;--this, or something like this, should be the
prevalent notion of Snow Hill, in those remote and rustic parts, through
which the Saracen's Head, like some grim apparition, rushes each day and
night with mysterious and ghost-like punctuality; holding its swift and
headlong course in all weathers, and seeming to bid defiance to the very
elements themselves.

The reality is rather different, but by no means to be despised
notwithstanding. There, at the very core of London, in the heart of its
business and animation, in the midst of a whirl of noise and motion:
stemming as it were the giant currents of life that flow ceaselessly on
from different quarters, and meet beneath its walls: stands Newgate; and
in that crowded street on which it frowns so darkly--within a few feet
of the squalid tottering houses--upon the very spot on which the vendors
of soup and fish and damaged fruit are now plying their trades--scores
of human beings, amidst a roar of sounds to which even the tumult of a
great city is as nothing, four, six, or eight strong men at a time, have