Study Edition · Essay 50
City of London Churches
Source: All the Year Round, 5 May 1860; collected in The Uncommercial Traveller (1861). Text from Project Gutenberg #914. ABRIDGED: about two-thirds of the essay is given, keeping the opening, the first church visited, the famous paragraph of smells and the closing reflection. Omitted passages are marked. Archaic verb forms modernized; vocabulary kept and glossed.
In his series The Uncommercial Traveller, Dickens wandered around London and wrote up what he saw, as a traveller who sold nothing but observations. Here he spends a year of Sundays slipping into the old churches of the City of London, the financial district, which by 1860 was crowded on weekdays and almost empty on Sundays, because people now lived in the suburbs. He opens with a comic memory of childhood sermons, then describes nearly empty services in dusty churches where even the air is made of “dead citizens.” Watch for his trademark tricks: invented names, comic exaggeration, a novelist's eye for strangers, and a sudden turn to sadness at the end.
75 sentences: 25 simple, 30 moderate, 20 complex. Hover a number for its paraphrase; click it for the full note.
Key Vocabulary
- offenceannoyance or hurt feelings
- purificationthe act of making clean, especially for a religious rite
- saponaceoussoapy
- congregationthe people gathered for a church service
- catechiseto question someone closely, like a religious examination
- oppressiveheavy, weighing down the spirits
- jocularityjoking; attempts at humour
- reverentialshowing deep respect
- effigya carved figure of a person, especially on a tomb
- antiquarianconcerned with old things and history
- ecclesiasticalrelating to the Church
- discordancea harsh mixture of sounds
- desuetudedisuse
- canonicalsthe official robes of a clergyman
- baizea coarse woollen cloth
- pulverisedground into powder
- hassocka firm cushion for kneeling in church
- cosmopolitanfrom many parts of the world
- vestrya room in a church where robes and records are kept
- edificea large, impressive building
The Essay
If the confession that I have often travelled from this Covent Garden lodging of mine on Sundays, should give offence to those who never travel on Sundays, they will be satisfied (I hope) by my adding that the journeys in question were made to churches.1
Not that I have any curiosity to hear powerful preachers.2 Time was, when I was dragged by the hair of my head, as one may say, to hear too many.3 On summer evenings, when every flower, and tree, and bird, might have better addressed my soft young heart, I have in my day been caught in the palm of a female hand by the crown, have been violently scrubbed from the neck to the roots of the hair as a purification for the Temple, and have then been carried off highly charged with saponaceous electricity, to be steamed like a potato in the unventilated breath of the powerful Boanerges Boiler and his congregation, until what small mind I had, was quite steamed out of me.4 In which pitiable plight I have been haled out of the place of meeting, at the conclusion of the exercises, and catechised respecting Boanerges Boiler, his fifthly, his sixthly, and his seventhly, until I have regarded that reverend person in the light of a most dismal and oppressive Charade.5 Time was, when I was carried off to platform assemblages at which no human child, whether of wrath or grace, could possibly keep its eyes open, and when I felt the fatal sleep stealing, stealing over me, and when I gradually heard the orator in possession, spinning and humming like a great top, until he rolled, collapsed, and tumbled over, and I discovered to my burning shame and fear, that as to that last stage it was not he, but I.6 I have sat under Boanerges when he has specifically addressed himself to us, us, the infants, and at this present writing I hear his lumbering jocularity (which never amused us, though we basely pretended that it did), and I behold his big round face, and I look up the inside of his outstretched coat-sleeve as if it were a telescope with the stopper on, and I hate him with an unwholesome hatred for two hours.7 Through such means did it come to pass that I knew the powerful preacher from beginning to end, all over and all through, while I was very young, and that I left him behind at an early period of life.8 Peace be with him!9 More peace than he brought to me!10
Now, I have heard many preachers since that time, not powerful; merely Christian, unaffected, and reverential, and I have had many such preachers on my roll of friends.11 But, it was not to hear these, any more than the powerful class, that I made my Sunday journeys.12 They were journeys of curiosity to the numerous churches in the City of London.13 It came into my head one day, here had I been cultivating a familiarity with all the churches of Rome, and I knew nothing of the insides of the old churches of London!14 This befell on a Sunday morning.15 I began my expeditions that very same day, and they lasted me a year.16
I never wanted to know the names of the churches to which I went, and to this hour I am profoundly ignorant in that particular of at least nine-tenths of them.17 Indeed, saying that I know the church of old Gower's tomb (he lies in effigy with his head upon his books) to be the church of Saint Saviour's, Southwark; and the church of Milton's tomb to be the church of Cripplegate; and the church on Cornhill with the great golden keys to be the church of Saint Peter; I doubt if I could pass a competitive examination in any of the names.18 No question did I ever ask of living creature concerning these churches, and no answer to any antiquarian question on the subject that I ever put to books, shall harass the reader's soul.19 A full half of my pleasure in them arose out of their mystery; mysterious I found them; mysterious they shall remain for me.20
Where shall I begin my round of hidden and forgotten old churches in the City of London?21
It is twenty minutes short of eleven on a Sunday morning, when I stroll down one of the many narrow hilly streets in the City that tend due south to the Thames.22 It is my first experiment, and I have come to the region of Whittington in an omnibus, and we have put down a fierce-eyed, spare old woman, whose slate-coloured gown smells of herbs, and who walked up Aldersgate-street to some chapel where she comforts herself with brimstone doctrine, I warrant.23 We have also put down a stouter and sweeter old lady, with a pretty large prayer-book in an unfolded pocket-handkerchief, who got out at a corner of a court near Stationers' Hall, and who I think must go to church there, because she is the widow of some deceased old Company's Beadle.24 The rest of our freight were mere chance pleasure-seekers and rural walkers, and went on to the Blackwall railway.25 So many bells are ringing, when I stand undecided at a street corner, that every sheep in the ecclesiastical fold might be a bell-wether.26 The discordance is fearful.27 My state of indecision is referable to, and about equally divisible among, four great churches, which are all within sight and sound, all within the space of a few square yards.28
As I stand at the street corner, I don't see as many as four people at once going to church, though I see as many as four churches with their steeples clamouring for people.29 I choose my church, and go up the flight of steps to the great entrance in the tower.30 A mouldy tower within, and like a neglected washhouse.31 A rope comes through the beamed roof, and a man in the corner pulls it and clashes the bell, a whity-brown man, whose clothes were once black, a man with flue on him, and cobweb.32 He stares at me, wondering how I come there, and I stare at him, wondering how he comes there.33 Through a screen of wood and glass, I peep into the dim church.34 About twenty people are discernible, waiting to begin.35 Christening would seem to have faded out of this church long ago, for the font has the dust of desuetude thick upon it, and its wooden cover (shaped like an old-fashioned tureen-cover) looks as if it wouldn't come off, upon requirement.36 I perceive the altar to be rickety and the Commandments damp.37 Entering after this survey, I jostle the clergyman in his canonicals, who is entering too from a dark lane behind a pew of state with curtains, where nobody sits.38 The pew is ornamented with four blue wands, once carried by four somebodys, I suppose, before somebody else, but which there is nobody now to hold or receive honour from.39 I open the door of a family pew, and shut myself in; if I could occupy twenty family pews at once I might have them.40 The clerk, a brisk young man (how does he come here?), glances at me knowingly, as who should say, ‘You have done it now; you must stop.’41 Organ plays.42 Organ-loft is in a small gallery across the church; gallery congregation, two girls.43 I wonder within myself what will happen when we are required to sing.44
There is a pale heap of books in the corner of my pew, and while the organ, which is hoarse and sleepy, plays in such fashion that I can hear more of the rusty working of the stops than of any music, I look at the books, which are mostly bound in faded baize and stuff.45 They belonged in 1754, to the Dowgate family; and who were they?46 Jane Comport must have married Young Dowgate, and come into the family that way; Young Dowgate was courting Jane Comport when he gave her her prayer-book, and recorded the presentation in the fly-leaf; if Jane were fond of Young Dowgate, why did she die and leave the book here?47 Perhaps at the rickety altar, and before the damp Commandments, she, Comport, had taken him, Dowgate, in a flush of youthful hope and joy, and perhaps it had not turned out in the long run as great a success as was expected?48
The opening of the service recalls my wandering thoughts.49 I then find, to my astonishment, that I have been, and still am, taking a strong kind of invisible snuff, up my nose, into my eyes, and down my throat.50 I wink, sneeze, and cough.51 The clerk sneezes; the clergyman winks; the unseen organist sneezes and coughs (and probably winks); all our little party wink, sneeze, and cough.52 The snuff seems to be made of the decay of matting, wood, cloth, stone, iron, earth, and something else.53 Is the something else, the decay of dead citizens in the vaults below?54 As sure as Death it is!55 Not only in the cold, damp February day, do we cough and sneeze dead citizens, all through the service, but dead citizens have got into the very bellows of the organ, and half choked the same.56 We stamp our feet to warm them, and dead citizens arise in heavy clouds.57 Dead citizens stick upon the walls, and lie pulverised on the sounding-board over the clergyman's head, and, when a gust of air comes, tumble down upon him.58
… In other cases, rot and mildew and dead citizens formed the uppermost scent, while, infused into it in a dreamy way not at all displeasing, was the staple character of the neighbourhood.59 In the churches about Mark-lane, for example, there was a dry whiff of wheat; and I accidentally struck an airy sample of barley out of an aged hassock in one of them.60 From Rood-lane to Tower-street, and thereabouts, there was often a subtle flavour of wine: sometimes, of tea.61 One church near Mincing-lane smelt like a druggist's drawer.62 Behind the Monument the service had a flavour of damaged oranges, which, a little further down towards the river, tempered into herrings, and gradually toned into a cosmopolitan blast of fish.63 In one church, the exact counterpart of the church in the Rake's Progress where the hero is being married to the horrible old lady, there was no speciality of atmosphere, until the organ shook a perfume of hides all over us from some adjacent warehouse.64
Be the scent what it would, however, there was no speciality in the people.65 There were never enough of them to represent any calling or neighbourhood.66 They had all gone elsewhere over-night, and the few stragglers in the many churches languished there inexpressively.67
Among the Uncommercial travels in which I have engaged, this year of Sunday travel occupies its own place, apart from all the rest.68 Whether I think of the church where the sails of the oyster-boats in the river almost flapped against the windows, or of the church where the railroad made the bells hum as the train rushed by above the roof, I recall a curious experience.69 On summer Sundays, in the gentle rain or the bright sunshine, either, deepening the idleness of the idle City, I have sat, in that singular silence which belongs to resting-places usually astir, in scores of buildings at the heart of the world's metropolis, unknown to far greater numbers of people speaking the English tongue, than the ancient edifices of the Eternal City, or the Pyramids of Egypt.70 The dark vestries and registries into which I have peeped, and the little hemmed-in churchyards that have echoed to my feet, have left impressions on my memory as distinct and quaint as any it has in that way received.71 In all those dusty registers that the worms are eating, there is not a line but made some hearts leap, or some tears flow, in their day.72 Still and dry now, still and dry! and the old tree at the window with no room for its branches, has seen them all out.73 So with the tomb of the old Master of the old Company, on which it drips.74 His son restored it and died, his daughter restored it and died, and then he had been remembered long enough, and the tree took possession of him, and his name cracked out.75
Sentence Notes
In plain English: If my admission that I often travel from my rooms in Covent Garden on Sundays offends people who never travel on the Sabbath, I hope they'll be satisfied when I add that I was travelling to church.
Reference & context: Strict Victorian Sabbath-keepers disapproved of any unnecessary travel on Sundays. Dickens kept an office and rooms at 26 Wellington Street, Covent Garden, where All the Year Round was published.
In plain English: Not that I'm curious to hear famous, forceful preachers.
In plain English: There was a time when I was dragged by the hair, so to speak, to hear far too many of them.
In plain English: On summer evenings, when every flower, tree and bird would have spoken better to my tender young heart, a woman's hand would grab me by the top of my head, scrub me fiercely from neck to hairline as if purifying me for the Temple, and then carry me off, crackling with soapy static, to be steamed like a potato in the stuffy breath of the mighty preacher Boanerges Boiler and his congregation, until what little mind I had was completely steamed out of me.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Comic exaggeration from a child's point of view: soap, static and steam turn worship into a cooking process.
Reference & context: “Boanerges” (“sons of thunder”) is the name Jesus gave to James and John (Mark 3:17); it came to mean a loud, fiery preacher. “Boiler” is Dickens's comic surname, suggesting a steamy, long-winded talker.
In plain English: In that pitiful state I would be hauled out of the chapel when the service ended and quizzed about Boanerges Boiler's fifth, sixth and seventh points, until I came to see that clergyman as a gloomy, crushing guessing game.
Reference & context: Long sermons were divided into numbered heads: “firstly, secondly…” A charade is a word-guessing game.
In plain English: There was a time when I was taken to public meetings where no child, whether a sinner or a saint, could keep its eyes open. I felt the deadly sleep creeping over me, and gradually heard the speaker spinning and humming like a huge top until he wobbled, collapsed and toppled over; and I realized, to my burning shame and terror, that the one who had toppled over was not him but me.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The twist at the end: the falling top was the sleepy boy himself.
Reference & context: “Child of wrath” and “child of grace” are religious phrases for the unsaved and the saved (Ephesians 2:3).
In plain English: I've sat listening to Boanerges when he spoke directly to us, the little children, and even as I write I can hear his clumsy jokes (which never amused us, though we cowardly pretended they did), see his big round face, and stare up the inside of his outstretched coat sleeve as if it were a telescope with the cap on, and I hate him with an unhealthy hatred for two hours.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The coat sleeve as a capped telescope is exactly the kind of odd detail only a bored child would notice.
In plain English: That is how I came to know the powerful preacher inside out while I was still very young, and how I left him behind early in life.
In plain English: Peace be with him!
In plain English: More peace than he ever gave me!
In plain English: Since then I have heard many preachers who were not “powerful,” just Christian, natural and reverent, and I've counted many such preachers among my friends.
In plain English: But it wasn't to hear them, any more than the powerful kind, that I made my Sunday trips.
In plain English: They were trips of pure curiosity to the many churches in the City of London.
Reference & context: “The City” is the square mile of old London, the business and banking district. In 1860 it had more than fifty parish churches, many rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of 1666.
In plain English: It struck me one day that I had made a point of getting to know all the churches of Rome, yet I knew nothing about the insides of London's old churches!
Reference & context: Dickens had toured Italy in 1844–45 and described Rome's churches in Pictures from Italy (1846).
In plain English: This happened on a Sunday morning.
In plain English: I started my expeditions that same day, and they kept me busy for a year.
In plain English: I never wanted to know the names of the churches I went to, and to this day I have no idea what at least nine out of ten of them are called.
In plain English: In fact, apart from knowing that the church with old Gower's tomb (where his stone figure lies with its head on his books) is St Saviour's in Southwark, that the church with Milton's tomb is the Cripplegate church, and that the church on Cornhill with the great golden keys is St Peter's, I doubt I could pass a test on any of their names.
Reference & context: John Gower (c. 1330–1408), poet and friend of Chaucer, is buried in what is now Southwark Cathedral. Milton is buried in St Giles-without-Cripplegate. The golden keys are the symbol of St Peter, who holds the keys of heaven.
In plain English: I never asked a living soul about these churches, and I won't torment the reader with any history I might have looked up in books.
In plain English: At least half my enjoyment came from their mystery. I found them mysterious, and mysterious they will stay for me.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The inverted word order (“mysterious I found them”) and the repetition give the sentence a deliberate, almost vow-like ring.
In plain English: Where should I start my tour of the hidden, forgotten old churches of the City?
In plain English: It is twenty minutes to eleven on a Sunday morning, and I'm walking down one of the City's many narrow, sloping streets that run straight south to the Thames.
Reference & context: Dickens switches to the present tense here, so the reader walks beside him.
In plain English: It is my first try. I've come to Dick Whittington's part of town by bus, and along the way we let off a thin, fierce-eyed old woman in a grey gown that smells of herbs, who walked up Aldersgate Street to some chapel where, I bet, she comforts herself with sermons about hellfire.
Reference & context: Dick Whittington, the hero of a famous legend, was a real Lord Mayor of London (d. 1423). An omnibus was a horse-drawn bus. “Brimstone doctrine” means preaching about the fires of hell.
In plain English: We also let off a plumper, sweeter old lady with a fairly large prayer book wrapped in a handkerchief, who got out at the corner of a courtyard near Stationers' Hall. I think she must go to church there because she's the widow of some old Company official.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Dickens invents life stories for strangers, as a novelist does.
Reference & context: Stationers' Hall belongs to one of the City's ancient trade guilds, or “livery companies.” A beadle was a minor official who kept order.
In plain English: The rest of our passengers were just day-trippers and country walkers heading on to the Blackwall railway.
In plain English: As I stand unsure at a street corner, so many church bells are ringing that you'd think every sheep in the Church's flock was wearing a bell.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A witty twist on the familiar image of the Church as a flock of sheep.
Reference & context: A bell-wether is the lead sheep of a flock, which wears a bell. Christians are often called the “flock” of a shepherd-pastor.
In plain English: The clash of sounds is dreadful.
In plain English: My indecision comes from, and is split roughly equally between, four big churches, all within sight and earshot, all within a few square yards of each other.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Mock-official language (“referable to,” “equally divisible among”) makes a small dilemma sound like a legal matter.
In plain English: Standing at the corner, I don't see even four people at once going to church, though I can see four churches with their steeples shouting for worshippers.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Four churches, not four worshippers: the empty City in one neat contrast.
In plain English: I pick my church and climb the steps to the big entrance in the tower.
In plain English: Inside, the tower is mouldy, like an abandoned laundry room.
In plain English: A rope hangs through the beamed ceiling, and a man in the corner pulls it to clang the bell: a greyish-brown man whose clothes were once black, covered in fluff and cobwebs.
Reference & context: “Flue” is fluff or dust.
In plain English: He stares at me, wondering what I'm doing there, and I stare at him, wondering what he's doing there.
In plain English: Through a wood-and-glass screen I peek into the dim church.
In plain English: I can make out about twenty people waiting for the service to start.
In plain English: Baptisms seem to have died out here long ago, because the font is thick with the dust of disuse, and its wooden lid (shaped like an old soup-tureen lid) looks as if it wouldn't come off if anyone needed it to.
Reference & context: The font is the stone basin used for baptizing babies. No baptisms means no young families in the parish.
In plain English: I notice that the altar is wobbly and the Ten Commandments are damp.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A deadpan joke: the moral law itself is going mouldy.
Reference & context: Many English churches displayed the Ten Commandments painted on boards behind the altar.
In plain English: Going in after this inspection, I bump into the clergyman in his robes, who is also coming in, from a dark passage behind a grand curtained pew where nobody sits.
In plain English: The pew is decorated with four blue staffs, once carried, I suppose, by four somebodies in front of some other somebody, but now there's nobody to carry them and nobody to be honoured by them.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The play on “somebody” and “nobody” captures faded importance.
In plain English: I open the door of a family pew and shut myself in; I could have twenty family pews if I could sit in them all at once.
Reference & context: Box pews with doors were once rented by families.
In plain English: The parish clerk, a lively young man (how did he end up here?), gives me a knowing look, as if to say, “Now you've done it; you have to stay.”
Reference & context: “As who should say” (old idiom): “as if to say.” The parish clerk led the congregation's responses and singing.
In plain English: The organ plays.
In plain English: The organ loft is in a small gallery across the church; the congregation up there consists of two girls.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Clipped, note-like sentences mimic a quick look around.
In plain English: I wonder privately what will happen when we have to sing.
In plain English: There's a faded pile of books in the corner of my pew, and while the hoarse, sleepy organ plays so that I hear more of its rusty machinery than of music, I look through the books, which are mostly bound in faded cloth.
In plain English: In 1754 they belonged to the Dowgate family. Who were they?
In plain English: Jane Comport must have married young Dowgate and joined the family that way. Young Dowgate was courting Jane when he gave her the prayer book and wrote a note about the gift on the first page. If Jane loved young Dowgate, why did she die and leave the book here?
Why this phrase is worth keeping: From two names on a flyleaf, Dickens spins a whole love story.
In plain English: Perhaps at that wobbly altar, in front of the damp Commandments, she, Comport, had married him, Dowgate, in a rush of young hope and joy, and perhaps in the long run it hadn't turned out as happily as expected?
In plain English: The start of the service brings my wandering thoughts back.
In plain English: Then I realize, to my amazement, that I have been breathing in, and still am, a strong sort of invisible snuff: up my nose, into my eyes and down my throat.
Reference & context: Snuff is powdered tobacco sniffed up the nose.
In plain English: I blink, sneeze and cough.
In plain English: The clerk sneezes; the clergyman blinks; the hidden organist sneezes and coughs (and probably blinks too); our whole little group blinks, sneezes and coughs.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The repeated verbs build a comic chorus of sneezing.
In plain English: The snuff seems to be made of rotting matting, wood, cloth, stone, iron, earth and something else.
In plain English: Is that something else the remains of dead citizens in the vaults underneath?
Reference & context: Many City churches had crowded burial vaults under the floor. Burials inside London churches were banned in the 1850s for health reasons.
In plain English: As sure as death, it is!
In plain English: Not only do we cough and sneeze dead citizens all through the service on this cold, damp February day; dead citizens have even got into the organ's bellows and half choked it.
In plain English: We stamp our feet to warm them, and dead citizens rise up in thick clouds.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A grimly comic joke on the Christian hope that the dead will “arise.”
In plain English: Dead citizens cling to the walls and lie ground to powder on the sounding board above the preacher's head, and when a gust of air blows, they tumble down on him.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The repeated phrase “dead citizens” turns a gruesome fact into a macabre refrain.
Reference & context: A sounding board is a canopy over a pulpit that helps project the preacher's voice.
In plain English: In other churches, rot, mildew and dead citizens were the strongest smell, but mixed into it, dreamily and not at all unpleasantly, was the smell of whatever the neighbourhood traded in.
Reference & context: Omitted: Dickens's descriptions of other churches and of a strange old man and child he kept seeing at services.
In plain English: In the churches around Mark Lane, for example, there was a dry whiff of wheat, and in one of them I accidentally knocked a puff of barley out of an old kneeling cushion.
Reference & context: Mark Lane was the centre of London's grain trade, home of the Corn Exchange.
In plain English: From Rood Lane to Tower Street and nearby, there was often a faint taste of wine, and sometimes of tea.
In plain English: One church near Mincing Lane smelled like a chemist's drawer.
Reference & context: Mincing Lane was the centre of the trade in spices, drugs and colonial produce.
In plain English: Behind the Monument the service smelled of bruised oranges, which a little further down toward the river softened into herrings and gradually turned into a worldwide blast of fish.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A walk through the City told entirely by smell, ending in an explosion of fish.
Reference & context: The Monument commemorates the Great Fire of 1666. Below it, by the river, was Billingsgate, London's great fish market.
In plain English: In one church, an exact copy of the church in Hogarth's The Rake's Progress where the hero marries the dreadful old woman, there was no particular smell until the organ shook a scent of animal skins over us from some warehouse next door.
Reference & context: William Hogarth's series of paintings A Rake's Progress (1733–35) shows a young heir's downfall; in the fifth scene he marries a rich, ugly old woman for her money in a shabby church.
In plain English: Whatever the smell, though, there was nothing special about the people.
In plain English: There were never enough of them to represent any trade or district.
In plain English: Everyone had gone home elsewhere the night before, and the few stragglers in all those churches drooped there with blank faces.
Reference & context: By 1860 most City workers lived in the suburbs and commuted by train and omnibus, leaving the City nearly deserted at weekends.
In plain English: Of all my Uncommercial journeys, this year of Sunday trips has a place of its own, separate from the rest.
In plain English: Whether I think of the church where the sails of the oyster boats on the river almost slapped against the windows, or the one where the trains rushing past above the roof made the bells hum, I remember a strange experience.
In plain English: On summer Sundays, in soft rain or bright sunshine, both of which made the idle City feel even idler, I have sat, in that peculiar silence of places that are usually busy, in dozens of buildings at the heart of the world's greatest city, which are unknown to far more English speakers than the ancient buildings of Rome or the Pyramids of Egypt.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The irony that Londoners know Rome's monuments better than their own.
In plain English: The dark back rooms and record rooms I've peeked into, and the little enclosed churchyards that echoed under my feet, have left memories as clear and charming as any I have of that kind.
In plain English: In all those dusty record books that worms are eating, there isn't a single line that didn't once make some heart leap or some tears fall.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The essay turns from comedy to tenderness: every dry entry was once a joy or a grief.
Reference & context: Parish registers recorded baptisms, marriages and burials.
In plain English: Silent and dry now, silent and dry! And the old tree by the window, with no room to spread its branches, has outlived them all.
In plain English: The same goes for the tomb of the old Master of the old guild, which the tree drips on.
In plain English: His son repaired it and died, his daughter repaired it and died, and then he had been remembered long enough, so the tree took him over and his name cracked away.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A quiet, devastating ending: memory lasts two generations, and then nature erases the name.
Fun Fact
Dickens's fears for the City churches came true. Between 1860 and 1900 about twenty of them were pulled down and their land sold, and the Blitz of 1940–41 destroyed or gutted many more. Today about forty survive, and several now hold free lunchtime concerts for the office workers who fill the City on weekdays.