I think he got this notion from
Kingsley's "Alton Locke," which, High Churchman though he for the nonce
was, he had devoured as he had devoured Stanley's Life of Arnold,
Dickens's novels, and whatever other literary garbage of the day was most
likely to do him harm; at any rate he actually put his scheme into
practice, and took lodgings in Ashpit Place, a small street in the
neighbourhood of Drury Lane Theatre, in a house of which the landlady was
the widow of a cabman.
This lady occupied the whole ground floor. In the front kitchen there
was a tinker. The back kitchen was let to a bellows-mender. On the
first floor came Ernest, with his two rooms which he furnished
comfortably, for one must draw the line somewhere. The two upper floors
were parcelled out among four different sets of lodgers: there was a
tailor named Holt, a drunken fellow who used to beat his wife at night
till her screams woke the house; above him there was another tailor with
a wife but no children; these people were Wesleyans, given to drink but
not noisy. The two back rooms were held by single ladies, who it seemed
to Ernest must be respectably connected, for well-dressed gentlemanly-
looking young men used to go up and down stairs past Ernest's rooms to
call at any rate on Miss Snow--Ernest had heard her door slam after they
had passed.
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