The Bridge was a sort of town to itself; it had its inn, its beer-houses, its bakeries, its haberdasheries, its food markets, its manufacturing industries, and even its church. It looked upon the two neighbours which it linked together — London and Southwark — as being well enough as suburbs, but not otherwise particularly important.

It was a close corporation, so to speak; it was a narrow town, of a single street a fifth of a mile long, its population was but a village population and everybody in it knew all his fellow-townsmen intimately, and had known their fathers and mothers before them — and all their little family affairs into the bargain. It had its aristocracy, of course — its fine old families of butchers, and bakers, and what-not, who had occupied the same old premises for five or six