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Chapter XLIII
Showing How Mr Samuel Weller Got Into Difficulties
In a lofty room, ill-lighted and worse ventilated, situated in Portugal
Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, there sit nearly the whole year round, one,
two, three, or four gentlemen in wigs, as the case may be, with little
writing-desks before them, constructed after the fashion of those used
by the judges of the land, barring the French polish. There is a box of
barristers on their right hand; there is an enclosure of insolvent
debtors on their left; and there is an inclined plane of most especially
dirty faces in their front. These gentlemen are the Commissioners of
the Insolvent Court, and the place in which they sit, is the Insolvent
Court itself.
It is, and has been, time out of mind, the remarkable fate of this court
to be, somehow or other, held and understood, by the general consent
of all the destitute shabby-genteel people in London, as their common
resort, and place of daily refuge. It is always full. The steams of beer
and spirits perpetually ascend to the ceiling, and, being condensed by
the heat, roll down the walls like rain; there are more old suits of
clothes in it at one time, than will be offered for sale in all
Houndsditch in a twelvemonth; more unwashed skins and grizzly
beards than all the pumps and shaving-shops between Tyburn and
Whitechapel could render decent, between sunrise and sunset.
It must not be supposed that any of these people have the least
shadow of business in, or the remotest connection with, the place they
so indefatigably attend. If they had, it would be no matter of surprise,
and the singularity of the thing would cease. Some of them sleep
during the greater part of the sitting; others carry small portable
dinners wrapped in pocket-handkerchiefs or sticking out of their
worn-out pockets, and munch and listen with equal relish; but no one
among them was ever known to have the slightest personal interest in
any case that was ever brought forward. Whatever they do, there they
sit from the first moment to the last. When it is heavy, rainy weather,
they all come in, wet through; and at such times the vapours of the
court are like those of a fungus-pit.
A casual visitor might suppose this place to be a temple dedicated to
the Genius of Seediness. There is not a messenger or process-server
attached to it, who wears a coat that was made for him; not a
tolerably fresh, or wholesome-looking man in the whole
establishment, except a little white-headed apple-faced tipstaff, and
even he, like an ill-conditioned cherry preserved in brandy, seems to
have artificially dried and withered up into a state of preservation to
which he can lay no natural claim. The very barristers' wigs are ill-
powdered, and their curls lack crispness.
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