Assignment 1: Tom-all-Alone’s and St. Giles’ Parish

Tom-all-Alone’s, the poverty-stricken street where Jo lives in Dickens’ Bleak House, is an imaginary location with clear similarities to the real world: specifically, the slums of St. Giles. Walking along the main streets of the St. Giles district today, surrounded by colorful office buildings and popular restaurants, it is difficult to believe that it was once a cesspool of poverty and disease. Wandering away from St. Giles High Street and Shaftesbury Avenue, though, one quickly ends up in a confusing network of narrow passages, where the reality of the district’s past reveals itself. It is easy to imagine that this dark, cramped setting was once one of the poorest areas in London, not unlike the destitute street of Tom-all-Alone’s.

Dickens’ vivid descriptions of Tom-all-Alone’s create an image of an area devastated by rampant crime and disease. When he first introduces the setting, he describes it as a “ruinous place… a black, dilapidated street, avoided by all decent people” (Dickens, 189). The description becomes only more dreary as it continues: “As, on the ruined human wretch, vermin parasites appear, so these ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards” (189). When Tom-all-Alone’s reappears later in the novel, it is accompanied by an illustration which highlights its bleakness: much of the street is obscured in shadow, and the buildings that are clearly visible are dirty and run-down.

William Hogarth’s “Gin Lane” engraving, set in St. Giles, is a near-perfect match to Dickens’ descriptions of Tom-all-Alone’s and the accompanying illustration. While the illustration in Bleak House is devoid of life, however, Hogarth’s engraving is bustling with activity: a careless mother pours gin into her baby’s mouth, an almost-skeletal man with a bottle in one hand and a glass in the other appears to be on the brink of death, and a group of people in the background lowers a woman’s corpse into a coffin. The spire of St. George’s rises over the slums, far in the background, not unlike the unnamed church tower in the background of the Tom-all-Alone’s illustration. The crumbling building on the right-hand side of “Gin Lane” is another similarity to Bleak House, where houses in Tom-all-Alone’s seem to collapse spontaneously: “Twice, lately, there has been a crash and a cloud of dust, like the springing of a mine, in Tom-all-Alone’s; and, each time, a house has fallen” (190). The amount of death and disease represented in Hogarth’s engraving is also fitting, as Tom-all-Alone’s later becomes the center of the smallpox epidemic which affects several of the novel’s characters.

Whether Dickens’ Tom-all-Alone’s was inspired specifically by St. Giles is impossible to say, but it is certain that Dickens was familiar with the area, given that he lived nearby and even described it in Sketches by Boz. Even though the area is now just as well-to-do as any other part of Central London, traces of its history still exist in its narrow, twisting streets, making it perfectly easy to imagine it as having once been no less squalorous than Tom-all-Alone’s.

“Tom-All-Alone’s” by Phiz (Hablot K. Browne), 1853. Source: victorianweb.org.

Gin Lane by William Hogarth, 1751. Source: britishmuseum.org.