Esoteric London

Argyle Street, London, WC1. Photo © Roger Dean 2011

The Wild Tribes of London – Watts Phillips, 1855:

“That,” pointing to a little old man, warming his shrivelled hands by the fire, “that’s Solomon Hart, – a regular Californy, they say. Ah, his father was the rummest old codger I ever knew. He’d read somewhere in the Scriptures that David was laid on a bed of gold. ‘Now, that’s my ambition,’ says he; and he got it too; for though he died in a garret close by here, it was on a mattress stuffed with suv’rins.” No easy bed to lie on, we should think. For ourselves, we would rather be the beggar crouching in lair of straw, than the miserable miser, palsied with fear, shaking upon his bed of gold.