Retitled 'City of the Absent' in collected editions of the series.

Between 1841 and 1901, the population of the City shrank from 123,000 to 27,000. In the present article Dickens offers a companion piece to his paper of 5 May 1860 on deserted churches in the City of London (see 'City of London Churches'): both explore the phenomenon now known to social scientists as depopulation of the urban core.

Dickens's interest in City churchyards—many of which belonged to churches that were not rebuilt after the ravages of the Great Fire of 1666—went well beyond the aesthetic. Amongst pamphlets in his library at Gad's Hill were George A. Walker's four series of Lectures... on the actual condition of the Metropolitan Graveyards&c. (1846-1849), J. D. Parry's essay Urban Burial: The London Churchyards&c. (1847), and a copy of the General Board of Health's influential Report on a General Scheme for Extramural Sepulture (Parliamentary Papers. Session 1850. Vol. 21.), forwarded by Dickens's brother-in-law Henry Austin who was Secretary to the Board. Dickens found the Report 'extraordinarily interesting', beginning it 'in bed' one night and 'dream[ing] of putrefaction generally' (Pilgrim, Vol. VI, p. 47&n). The major problem with the City churchyards, as these sources clearly document, was that not only did they lack the future capacity for the proper interments of London's mushrooming population, but that existing overcrowding presented a serious risk to health that government needed to act upon. Dickens wrote frequently in HW in support of the Board of Health and its mission to improve sanitation (see Vol. II of the Dent edition of Dickens's Journalism, endnote to Item 41, and Item 56; Vol. III of the Dent edition, Items 14 and 27). He also commissioned an article for HW, 'Heathen and Christian Burial' (attributed to George Hogarth and W.H. Wills) specifically dealing with the Board's 'admirable report on Burials', and supporting its recommendations to remedy the problem of 'closely-packed burial-grounds in crowded cities' (6 April 1850, see also Pilgrim, Vol. VI, pp. 55-56&n.). Agitation of this nature contributed in the mid-1850s to the City's establishing its own cemetery at a greenfields site in Little Ilford, then in Essex. This did nothing to improve the condition of existing City burial grounds, however.

The churchyard dubbed 'Saint Ghastly Grim' by the Uncommercial Traveller, is that belonging to St Olave's on Hart Street, within sight of Fenchurch Street Station, which Dickens used for many of his East-end expeditions (O. Sack, 'Saint Ghastly Grim', The Dickensian, Vol. 9 [1913], pp. 323-324). The ghoulish churchyard gateway described dates from 1658, and follows a design by Dutch architect Hendrik de Keyser. Gwen Major has supplied probable 'originals' for a number of the other churchyards described in the paper: that with the 'Lombardy Poplar' belonging to St Swithin's on St Swithin's Lane; that between 'Gracechurch-street and the Tower' belonging to St Mary-at-Hill on the street of the same name; and that where the two 'charity children' make love, belonging to St Michael Paternoster Royal on College Hill ('Into the Shadowy Past', The Dickensian, Vol. 64 [1968], pp. 28-33).

Observations about the elderly men 'let out of workhouses by the hour' according to the Poor Law regulations of the time, recall the essay-like opening to Ch. 31 of Little Dorrit (1857), and the circumstances of the character 'Old Nandy'. Likewise, Dickens's description of 'Nadgett' in Ch. 27 of Martin Chuzzlewit (1844)—'always keeping appointments in the city and the other man never seemed to come'—is generalised here in meditations on the 'men who wait at Garraway's'. The original Garraway's coffee house stood in Exchange Alley, Cornhill No. 3, and though celebrated for being the first coffee house to sell tea, was more famous in the 1860s for its sherry and sandwiches. John Timbs notes in Curiosities of London (1855) the existence of a fourteenth or fifteenth century crypt below Garraway's, described as 'ecclesiastical in character [with a]... piscine... now used as the coffee-house wine cellar' (quoted in Bryant Lillywhite, Reference Book of the Coffee Houses of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, 1963, Item no. 433).

Textual note:

• copytext has 'It was so freshening': Uncommercial Traveller, Charles Dickens Edition (1868) has 'It was so refreshing'.

Literary allusions:

• 'their song is Willow, Willow': 'Sing willow, willow, willow'&c., Desdemona's song in Shakespeare's Othello (1602–1604) Act 4, Sc. 3, adapted from John Heywood's lyric 'The Green Willow';
• 'regions of the Wonderful Lamp': the story of 'Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp' from The Arabian Nights;
• 'the Last Man': playful allusion to Thomas Campbell's poem 'The Last Man' (1823) or to Mary Shelley's novel with this title (1826).

Author: John Drew; © J. M. Dent/Orion Publishing Group, Dickens' Journalism Volume IV: 'The Uncommercial Traveller' and Other Papers, 1859-1870, 2000.

DJO gratefully acknowledges permission to reproduce this material.

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