Esoteric London

White Post Lane, London, E9. Photo ©RogerDean 2014

The Mysteries Of London, Vol. I – George W.M. Reynolds, 1844:

CHAPTER LXV.

THE WRONGS AND CRIMES OF THE POOR.

The guests in the Dark-House parlour formed about as pleasant an assemblage of scamps as one could wish to behold. The establishment was a notorious resort for thieves and persons of the worst character; and no one who frequented it thought it worth while to shroud his real occupation beneath an air of false modesty. The conversation in the parlour, therefore, usually turned upon the tricks and exploits of the thieves frequenting the place; and many entertaining autobiographical sketches were in this way delivered. Women often constituted a portion of the company in the parlour; and they ware invariably the most noisy and quarrelsome of all the guests. Whenever the landlord was compelled to call in the police, to have a clearance of the house – a proceeding to which he only had recourse when his guests were drunk and penniless, and demanded supplies of liquor upon credit, – a woman was sure to be at the bottom of the row; and a virago of Spitalfields would think no more of smashing every window in the house, or dashing out the landlord’s brains with one of his own pewter- pots, than of tossing off a tumbler of raw gin without winking.
On the evening of which we are writing there were several women in the parlour of the Dark-House. These horrible females were the “blowens” of the thieves frequenting the house, and the principal means of disposing of the property stolen by their paramours. They usually ended by betraying their lovers to the police, in fits of jealousy […].