Famous Houses and Literary Shrines of London

Coming to close quarters with it, I am not sure that, after all, Chelsea has not more to offer the literary pilgrim than even Hampstead has. Addison, Locke, Smollett, Horace Wal...

At one of those free-and-easy sociable gatherings in Lamb's rooms, in the Temple, which Hazlitt has so happily immortalised, Lamb provoked some discussion by asking which of all...

If we were not quite such a business people, and had not so fully satisfied ourselves that the making of money is the chief end of existence, we should put up a statue to Dr. Jo...

One of Sir James Thornhill's illustrious sitters was Sir Isaac Newton, who lived within a stone's throw of Hogarth's London house, just round the corner out of Leicester Square,...

When I was writing of what remains to us of the London of Shakespeare, I might have mentioned the four-century-old gateway of Lincoln's Inn, in Chancery Lane, that Ben Jonson he...

Out at Hampstead you may still visit what was once that studio of Romney's to which Flaxman sent his collection of plaster casts from Italy. It had been a favourite idea of Romn...

Ten years before Boswell went to live at 56 Great Queen Street, William Blake was serving an apprenticeship to James Basire, the well-known engraver, whose house was close by at...

Mary Lamb passed the later years of her life in a sort of nursing home at St. John's Wood, and in her happier intervals kept up a pleasant acquaintance with some of the notable...

Everybody has heard of _Sandford and Merton_, and hardly anybody nowadays has read it. I confess with shame that I am one who has not. But I have come across so many parodies of...

The London that Shakespeare knew has vanished like a dream. The Great Fire swept most of it out of existence in a few days of 1666, and the two and a half centuries of time sinc...

No other literary Londoner has taken root as Carlyle did in Cheyne Row and remained for nearly half a century without once changing his address. Thackeray shifted about from pla...

As a general thing the literary man is not to be found living in the aristocratic quarters of the town until after he has done his best work and has begun to make money out of h...

Before he took up residence at the Twickenham villa, Pope lived for some time with his father in one of the houses of Mawson's Buildings (now Mawson Row), Chiswick. So far it ha...

Thackeray's London was practically bounded on the east by the Temple, or perhaps by the Fleet Prison, which lay a little beyond the _Punch_ office; it took in the Strand, Pall M...

Coming from Chelsea by way of Battersea Bridge, you go a few yards along the Battersea Bridge Road, then turn aside into Church Road, and presently you pass a narrow, mean stree...

You cannot stir the ground of London anywhere but straightway it flowers into romance. Read the inscriptions on the crumbling tombs of our early merchant princes and adventurers...