Daily Independent

MADE FAMOUS BY DICKENS

Places Are Hardly Discoverable as One by One They Have Undergone Changes.

One by one the places made famous by Charles Dickens have undergone such changes that they are hardly discoverable.

The rookeries in Tabard street, Southwark borough, among the last of these places are now being closed up and very soon this characteristic place of Dickens-land in London will have passed away, the "housing committee" having determined for sanitary reasons that it must be obliterated. The Church of St. George the Martyr, which stands at one end of the street, is the house of worship immortalized as Little Dorrit's church, and on this account is visited every year by thousands of American admirers of the great novelist Near the other end of the street was the Marshalsea prison for debtors, where Little Dorrit's father, a man with "a mild voice, curling hair and irresolute hands," as the years passed by became gray-haired and venerable and was known as "the father of the Marshalsea," a title of which he grew to be ridiculously vain And this character (much of the color of which Dickens is said to have taken from that of his own father) is one of the most pathetic in any of his novels

But the medical officer for the district says it has long had a wicked reputation, and London cannot allow such a degraded and unhealthy spot to remain, no matter what its romantic and historic interest. Long before the days of Dickens this corner of Southwark was known as the hiding place of highwaymen and debtors of the worst description