Twice round the clock; or, The hours of the day and night in London

Suggest and discuss books to read (all languages welcome!)
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InTheDesert
Posts: 7360
Joined: August 20th, 2019, 8:25 pm

Post by InTheDesert »

It would be a sorry piece of vanity on my part to imagine that the conception of the History of a Day and Night in London is original. I will tell you how I came to think of the scheme of "Twice Round the Clock." Four years ago, in Paris, my then Master in literature, Mr. Charles Dickens, lent me a little thin octavo volume, which, I believe, had been presented to him by another Master of the craft, Mr. Thackeray, entitled - but I will transcribe the title-page in full.

LOW LIFE;
OR, ONE HALF THE WORLD KNOWS NOT HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVE.
Being a Critical Account of what is Transacted by People of almost all Religions, Nations, Circumstances, and Sizes of Understanding, in the
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS,
BETWEEN
SATURDAY NIGHT AND MONDAY MORNING.
In a true Description of a
SUNDAY,
As it is usually spent within the Bills of Mortality, calculated for the twenty-first of June.
WITH AN ADDRESS TO THE INGENIOUS AND INGENUOUS MR. HOGARTH.
Let Fancy guess the rest.-Buckingham.


The date of publication is not given; but internal evidence proves the Opuscule to have been written during the latter part of the reign of George the Second; and in the copy I now possess, and which I bought at a "rarity" price, at a sale where it was ignorantly labelled among the "facetiae" -it is the saddest book, perhaps, that ever was written - in my copy, which is bound up among some rascally pamphlets, there is written on the fly-leaf the date 1759. Just one hundred years ago, you see. The work is anonymous; but in a manuscript table of contents to the collection of miscellanies of which it forms part, I find Written "By Tom Legge." The epigraph says that it "is printed for the author, and is to be sold by T. Legg, at the Parrot, Green Arbour Court, in the Little Old Bailey." Was the authorship mere guess-work on the part of the owner of the book, or was "Tom Legge" really the writer of "Low Life," and, if so, who was Tom Legge? Mr. Peter Cunningham, or a contributor to "Notes and Queries," may be able to inform us. I have been thus particular, for a reason that this thin octavo is one of the minutest, the most graphic-and while in parts coarse as a scene from the "Rake's Progress," the [-x-] most pathetic, picture of London life a century since that has been written.
The preface is from this book:

https://archive.org/details/twiceroundclocko00sala/page/n16/mode/1up

The book it is modelled on is:

https://books.google.com/books?id=HxpbAAAAcAAJ
Medieval History Volume 02 The Rise of the Saracens and the Foundation of the Western Empire 99% 1 left! "The Carlovingian Revolution, and Frankish Intervention in Italy Part 3 by G. L. Burr"
DPL DPL 27 19 43
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