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https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/5/Street_Sketches_No._IV_Shabby-genteel_People/1834-11-05-Street_Sketches_No4_Shabby-Genteel_People.pdf
c5fc7e96cfa9a50173912fbcf330b2ff
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Title
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Short Fiction
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short-stories
Contributor
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Lydia Craig
Scripto
Transcription
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<p><strong>This collection (still in development) unites various short stories that Dickens wrote throughout his career for various publications, including newspapers and periodicals, and for inclusion in short story collections.</strong></p>
<p>Between 1833, when he tentatively submitted “A Dinner at Poplar Walk” for publication in <em>The Monthly Magazine,</em> and his death in 1870, Dickens as ‘BOZ,’ briefly, as ‘TIBBS,’ and as “Charles Dickens” wrote dozens of short stories and ‘sketches,’ which often moved easily between journalism and story. It was as Boz, the late Georgian literary persona, that he first endeared himself to the British reading public in the pages of such newspapers and periodicals as <em>The Evening Chronicle</em>, <em>Bell’s Life in London, </em>and <em>Bentley's Miscellany</em> with a unique blend of comedy and pathos. By turns scathing of observed social and personal injustices, and appreciative of London’s colourful, vibrant culture and the oddities of human nature, Boz followed in the literary footsteps of other recent metropolitan commentators like Charles Lamb (‘ELIA’), Leigh Hunt, Theodore Hook, Robert Surtees, Thomas Hood, and John Poole, and eighteenth-century Picaresque novelists, Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding. Soon, Dickens established his own unique voice. Prior to and following the ascension of the young Queen Victoria in 1837, Boz became a prescient spectator of both the rising empire’s rapidly developing culture in public spaces and of the domestic dramas enacted in British homes.</p>
<p>Global fame arrived with the serial publication of <em>The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club</em> (1837), marking Dickens’s shift to writing novels. In tone, this rambling comedic travelogue owed much to Boz’s voice and incidentally featured several tales unrelated to the main narrative. Dickens would sporadically publish the Mudfog stories in 1836 and 1837, enlarging on them in <em>Sketches by Boz</em>, a collection of many of the sketches and stories first published by John Macrone in two volumes in 1836 and 1837 and illustrated by George Cruikshank. According to Robert L. Patten, ‘When Dickens gathered up previously published writing, anonymous and pseudonymous, for republication, he identified authorship with a particular subset of his journalistic pieces, the ‘sketches’ rather than the tales or portraits of characters, and with his pseudonym. Hence, after mooting several other titles, Dickens settled on <em>Sketches by Boz</em>’ (44). <em>Sketches of Young Gentlemen</em> (1838), a joking response to Rev. Edward Caswell, or “QUIZ’s” recent effort <em>Sketches of Young Ladies</em> (1838), and <em>Sketches of Couples</em> (1840) were published by Chapman and Hall and illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne, better known as ‘PHIZ’.</p>
<p>After this point, Dickens’s short stories were published in his periodicals <em>Household Words</em> and <em>All the Year Round</em>, though after 1837 he never published them with any regularity, preferring instead to focus on writing and serialising novels. Occasionally, he contributed several chapters to a jointly authored short story, collection, or series; Christmas numbers of his periodicals provided the opportunity to feature multiple famous writers uniting to weave a Yule-tide yarn, such as <em>The Haunted House</em> (1859). Notably, his collaboration with Wilkie Collins resulted in such works as <em>The Perils of Certain English Prisoners</em> (1857) and <em>No Thoroughfare</em> (1867). Towards the end of his life, Dickens began to publish short stories again in American publications such as <em>The New York Ledger, The Atlantic Monthly, </em>and <em>Our Young Folks</em>.</p>
<p>Until now, first printings of Dickens’s earliest short stories published between 1833 and 1836 have been difficult to find for those unable to visit the periodicals and newspaper holdings at eminent institutions such as The British Library. Similarly, the last ones written by Dickens have remained understudied due in part to their obscurity. Twentieth-century editions of the <em>Sketches </em>are generally based on the text of Chapman and Hall’s later 1839 single volume edition, which relies on the reissue serialised between 1837 and 1839, or the 1868 Charles Dickens Edition, which is based on the 1850 cheap (and further revised) edition.</p>
<p>Other anthologies, for instance <em>Selected Short Fiction</em> (Penguin, 2005), edited by Deborah A. Thomas, choose excerpts from Dickens’s entire <em>oeuvre </em>in the short fiction genre. Several scholars have explored the drafting, publication, and impact of the early sketches and short stories, with notable studies including <em>Dickens and the Short Story</em>. (University of Philadelphia Press, 1982) by Deborah A. Thomas and <em>Charles Dickens and ‘Boz’: The Birth of the Industrial-Age Author</em> (Cambridge, 2012) by Patten.1 To date, the most comprehensive overview of the sketches is provided by<em> The Oxford Edition of Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz</em> (2021) edited by Paul Schlicke with David Hewitt. Others include <em>Dickens's Uncollected Magazine and Newspaper Sketches as Originally Composed and Published 1833–1836</em> (2012), edited by Robert C. Hanna, and <em>Sketches by Boz and Other Early Papers</em> (1994), edited by Michael Slater.</p>
<p>Because Dickens made many alterations, whether significant or incidental, between the first printing of a sketch and successive editions, these changes open up a window into his editorial process and developing intentions for the ‘Boz’ legacy. Now, with this <em>Dickens Search</em> collection, these emendations can be studied with greater ease than ever before. Our transcription field contains text Dickens is believed to have solely authored, though our pdfs of the short story collaborations will be provided in their entirety to facilitate easier engagement and comprehension of how his narrative might interact with those constructed by other writers. Ngram search and other text analysis tools will be applied to Dickens’s words only, to avoid skewing the results.<br /><br />While building this collection, we have consulted, and transcribed scans found on databases such as <em>British Newspaper Archive (BNA),</em> digital archives, and such open-access sites as<em> Hathi Trust, Internet Archive,</em> and <em>Google Books</em>; all items are linked to their original location on the internet.</p>
<p>Please contact us with any errors, corrections, and suggestions, or to mention other short stories by Dickens that might have been overlooked.</p>
1. See Dominic Rainsford. ‘“Luller-li-e-te”! Language, Personhood, and Sympathy in <em>Sketches by Boz.’</em> In <em>Some Keywords in Dickens</em>. Edited by Michael Hollington, Francesca Orestano, and Nathalie Vanfasse. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021, pp. 117-130; William F. Long. ‘“Our Space is Limited”: Fitting Sketches by Boz into the <em>Morning Chronicle</em>”. <em>Dickens Quarterly </em>4 (December 2020): pp. 325-348; William F. Long. 'Dickens before <em>Sketches by Boz</em>: Earliest Reactions to his Earliest Works'. <em>Dickensian</em> (2018), 114.505, pp.170-176; Christina Jen. '"Drop the Curtain": Astonishment and the Anxieties of Authorship in Charles Dickens's <em>Sketches by Boz. Dickens Studies Annual</em> 49.2 (2018): pp. 249-278; Dianne F. Sadoff. ‘Boz and Beyond: “Oliver Twist” and the Dickens Legacy’. <em>Dickens Studies Annual</em> 45 (2014): pp. 23-44; <em>Dickens's Uncollected Magazine and Newspaper Sketches, as Originally Composed and Published, 1833–1836, </em>No. 46. Ed. Robert C. Hanna (2012): New York, AMS Press; Danielle Coriale. ‘Sketches by Boz, “So Frail a Machine”. <em>SEL: Studies in English Literature </em>48.4 (2008): pp. 801-812; Paul Schlicke. ‘“Risen Like a Rocket”: The Impact of <em>Sketches by Boz’</em>. <em>Dickens Quarterly</em> 22.1 (2005): pp. 3-18; Ellen Miller Casey. ‘“Boz has got the Town by the ear”: Dickens and the “Athenæum Critics”’. <em>Dickens Studies Annual</em> 33 (2003): pp. 159-190; Richard Maxwell. ‘Dickens, the Two “Chronicles”, and the Publication of “Sketches by Boz”’. <em>Dickens Studies Annual</em> 9 (1981): pp. 21–32; Angus Easson. “Who is Boz? Dickens and His Sketches”. <em>The Dickensian</em> 18.1.405 (Spring 1985): pp. 13-22; Julian W. Breslow. 'The Narrator in <em>Sketches by Boz</em>.' <em>ELH</em> 44.1 (1977): pp. 127–49.
Short Story
Publication Type
E.g. newspaper/serial
Newspaper
Publication
The title of the newspaper/serial (if applicable)
<em>The Morning Chronicle</em>
Pseudonym
The name under which the item was published
BOZ
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18341105
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Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML.
There are certain descriptions of people who, oddly enough, appear to appertain exclusively to the metropolis. You meet them every day in the streets of London, but no one ever encounters them elsewhere; they seem indigenous to the soil, and to belong as exclusively to London as its own smoke, or the dingy bricks and mortar. We could illustrate the remark by a variety of examples, but in our present sketch we will only advert to one class as a specimen—that class which is so aptly and expressively designated as "shabby-genteel." Now, shabby people, God knows, may be found anywhere, and genteel people are not articles of greater scarcity out of London, than in it: but this compound of the two—this shabby-gentility—is as purely local as the statue at Charing-cross, or the pump at Aldgate. It is worthy of remark, too, that only men are shabby-genteel; a woman is always either dirty and slovenly in the extreme, or neat and respectable, however poverty-stricken in appearance. A very poor man, "who has seen better days," as the phrase goes, is a strange compound of dirty slovenliness and wretched attempts at a kind of faded smartness. We will endeavour to explain our conception of the term which forms the title of this paper. If you meet a man lounging up Drury-lane, or leaning with his back against a post in Long-acre, with his hands in the pockets of a pair of drab trowsers plentifully besprinkled with grease spots, the trousers made very full over the boot, and ornamented with two cords down the outside of each leg—wearing also what has been a brown coat with bright buttons, and a hat very much pinched up at the sides, cocked over his right eye—don’t pity him; he is not shabby-genteel. The "harmonic meetings" at some fourth-rate public-house, or the purlieus of a private theatre, are his chosen haunts; he entertains a rooted antipathy to any kind of work, and is on familiar terms with several pantomime-men at the large houses. But, if you see hurrying along a bye street, keeping as close as he can to the area railings, a man of about 50 or 50, clad in an old rusty suit of threadbare black cloth, which shines with constant wear, as if it had been bees-waxed, the trowsers tightly strapped down, partly for the look of the thing, and partly to keep his old shoes from slipping off at the heels; if you observe, too, that his yellowish-white neck-kerchief is carefully pinned down, and his waistcoat as carefully pinned up, to conceal the tattered garment underneath, and that his hands are encased in the remains of an old pair of beaver gloves, you may set him down as a shabby-genteel man. A glance at that depressed face, and timorous air of conscious poverty, will make your heart ache—always supposing that you are neither a philosopher, nor a political economist. We were once haunted by a shabby-genteel man; he was bodily present to our senses all day, and he was in our mind’s eye all night. The man of whom Walter Scott speaks in his Demonology, did not suffer half the persecution from his imaginary gentleman-usher in black velvet, that we sustained from our friend in quondam black cloth. He first attracted our notice by sitting opposite to us in the reading-room at the British Museum, and what made the man more remarkable was, that he always had before him a couple of shabby-genteel books—two old dogs-eared folios, in mouldy worm-eaten covers, which had once been smart. He was in his chair every morning just as the clock struck ten; he was always the last to leave the room in the afternoon; and when he did, he quitted it with the air of a man who knew not where else to go for warmth and quiet. There he used to sit all day, as close to the table as possible, in order to conceal the lack of buttons on his coat, with his old hat carefully deposited at his feet, where he evidently flattered himself it escaped observation. About two o’clock you would see him munching a French roll or a penny loaf—not taking it boldly out of his pocket at once, like a man who knew he was only making a lunch, but breaking off little bits in his pocket, and eating them by stealth. He knew too well it was his dinner. When we first saw this poor object, we thought it quite impossible that his attire could ever become worse. We even went so far as to speculate on the possibility of his shortly appearing in a decent second-hand suit. We knew nothing about the matter; he grew more and more shabby genteel every day. The buttons dropped off his waistcoat one by one; then he buttoned his coat; and when one side of the coat was reduced to the same condition as the waistcoat, he buttoned it over on the other side. He looked somewhat better at the beginning of the week than at the conclusion, because the neck-kerchief, though yellow, was not quite so dingy; and in the midst of all this wretchedness he never appeared without gloves and straps. He remained in this state for a week or two; at length one of the buttons on the back of the coat fell off, and then the man himself disappeared, and we thought he was dead. We were sitting at the same table about a week after his disappearance, and as our eyes rested on his vacant chair, we insensibly fell into a train of meditation on the subject of his retirement from public life. We were wondering whether he had hung himself or thrown himself off a bridge—whether he really was dead, or had only been arrested—when our conjectures were suddenly set at rest by the entry of the man himself. He had undergone some strange metamorphosis, and walked up the centre of the room with an air which showed he was fully conscious of the improvement in his appearance. It was very odd; his clothes were a fine, deep, glossy black, and yet they looked like the same suit; nay, there were the very darns, with which old acquaintance had made us familiar. The hat, too—nobody could mistake the shape of that hat, with its high crown, gradually increasing in circumference towards the top. Long service had imparted to it a reddish-brown tint, but now it was as black as the coat. The truth flashed suddenly upon us—they had been "revived." 'Tis a deceitful liquid that black and blue reviver; we have watched its effects on many a shabby-genteel man. It betrays its victims into a temporary assumption of importance, possibly into the purchase of a new pair of gloves, or a cheap stock, or some other trifling article of dress. It elevates their spirits for a week, only to depress them, if possible, below their original level. It was so in this case; the transient dignity of the unhappy man decreased in exact proportion as the "reviver" wore off. The knees of the unmentionables, and the elbows of the coat, and the seams generally, soon began to get alarmingly white; the hat was once more deposited under the table, and its owner crept into his seat as quietly as ever. There was a week of incessant small rain and mist. At its expiration the "reviver" had entirely vanished, and the shabby-genteel man never afterwards attempted to effect any improvement in his outward appearance. It would be difficult to name any particular part of town as the principal resort of shabby-genteel men. We have met a great many persons of this description in the neighbourhood of the Inns of Court. They may be met with in Holborn, between eight and ten any morning; and whoever has the curiosity to enter the Insolvent Debtors’ Court, will observe, both among spectators and practitioners, a great variety of them. We never went on ‘Change, by any chance, without seeing some shabby-genteel men, and we have often wondered what earthly business they can have there. They will sit there for hours, leaning on great, dropsical, mildewed umbrellas, or eating Abernethy biscuits; nobody speaks to them, nor they to any one. On consideration, we remember to have occasionally seen two shabby-genteel men conversing together on ‘Change; but our experience assures us that this is an uncommon circumstance, occasioned by the offer of a pinch of snuff, or some such civility. It would be a task of equal difficulty either to assign any particular spot for the residence of these beings, or to endeavour to enumerate their general occupations. We were never engaged in business with more than one shabby-genteel man; and he was a drunken engraver, and lived in a damp back parlour, in a new row of houses at Camden-town, half street, half brick-field, somewhere near the canal. A shabby-genteel man may have no occupation at all, or he may be a corn agent, or a coal agent, or a wine agent, or a collector of debts, or a broker’s assistant, or a broken-down attorney. He may be a clerk of the lowest description, or a contributor to the press of the same grade. Whether our readers have noticed these men in their walks as often as we have, we know not; this we know—that the miserably poor man (no matter whether he owes his distresses to his own conduct, or that of others) who feels his poverty, and vainly strives to conceal it, is one of the most pitiable objects in human nature. Such objects, with few exceptions, are "shabby-genteel people."
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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'<em>Street Sketches</em>, No. IV, Shabby-genteel People'
Description
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Published in <em>The Morning Chronicle </em>(5 November 1834), p.3.
Creator
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Dickens, Charles
Source
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<em>The British Newspaper Archive,</em> <a href="https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000082/18341105/012/0003">https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000082/18341105/012/0003</a>.
Date
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1834-11-05
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Short story
Identifier
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1834-11-05-Street_Sketches_No4_Shabby-Genteel_People
Bibliographic Citation
A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible.
Dickens, Charles. '<em>Street Sketches</em>, No. IV, Shabby-genteel People' (5 November 1834). <em>Dickens Search.</em> Eds. Emily Bell and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://www.dickenssearch.com/short-stories/1834-11-05-Street_Sketches_No4_Shabby-Genteel_People">https://www.dickenssearch.com/short-stories/1834-11-05-Street_Sketches_No4_Shabby-Genteel_People</a>.
Rights
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<p><em>The British Newspaper Archive. </em>Some rights reserved. This work permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.</p>
Scripto
Transcription
A written representation of a document.
There are certain descriptions of people who, oddly enough, appear to appertain exclusively to the metropolis. You meet them every day in the streets of London, but no one ever encounters them elsewhere; they seem indigenous to the soil, and to belong as exclusively to London as its own smoke, or the dingy bricks and mortar. We could illustrate the remark by a variety of examples, but in our present sketch we will only advert to one class as a specimen—that class which is so aptly and expressively designated as "shabby-genteel." Now, shabby people, God knows, may be found anywhere, and genteel people are not articles of greater scarcity out of London, than in it: but this compound of the two—this shabby-gentility—is as purely local as the statue at Charing-cross, or the pump at Aldgate. It is worthy of remark, too, that only men are shabby-genteel; a woman is always either dirty and slovenly in the extreme, or neat and respectable, however poverty-stricken in appearance. A very poor man, "who has seen better days," as the phrase goes, is a strange compound of dirty slovenliness and wretched attempts at a kind of faded smartness.<br /><br />We will endeavour to explain our conception of the term which forms the title of this paper. If you meet a man lounging up Drury-lane, or leaning with his back against a post in Long-acre, with his hands in the pockets of a pair of drab trowsers plentifully besprinkled with grease spots, the trousers made very full over the boot, and ornamented with two cords down the outside of each leg—wearing also what has been a brown coat with bright buttons, and a hat very much pinched up at the sides, cocked over his right eye—don’t pity him; he is not shabby-genteel. The "harmonic meetings" at some fourth-rate public-house, or the purlieus of a private theatre, are his chosen haunts; he entertains a rooted antipathy to any kind of work, and is on familiar terms with several pantomime-men at the large houses. But, if you see hurrying along a bye street, keeping as close as he can to the area railings, a man of about 50 or 50, clad in an old rusty suit of threadbare black cloth, which shines with constant wear, as if it had been bees-waxed, the trowsers tightly strapped down, partly for the look of the thing, and partly to keep his old shoes from slipping off at the heels; if you observe, too, that his yellowish-white neck-kerchief is carefully pinned down, and his waistcoat as carefully pinned up, to conceal the tattered garment underneath, and that his hands are encased in the remains of an old pair of beaver gloves, you may set him down as a shabby-genteel man. A glance at that depressed face, and timorous air of conscious poverty, will make your heart ache—always supposing that you are neither a philosopher, nor a political economist.<br /><br />We were once haunted by a shabby-genteel man; he was bodily present to our senses all day, and he was in our mind’s eye all night. The man of whom Walter Scott speaks in his Demonology, did not suffer half the persecution from his imaginary gentleman-usher in black velvet, that we sustained from our friend in <em>quondam</em> black cloth. He first attracted our notice by sitting opposite to us in the reading-room at the British Museum, and what made the man more remarkable was, that he always had before him a couple of shabby-genteel books—two old dogs-eared folios, in mouldy worm-eaten covers, which had once been smart. He was in his chair every morning just as the clock struck ten; he was always the last to leave the room in the afternoon; and when he did, he quitted it with the air of a man who knew not where else to go for warmth and quiet. There he used to sit all day, as close to the table as possible, in order to conceal the lack of buttons on his coat, with his old hat carefully deposited at his feet, where he evidently flattered himself it escaped observation. About two o’clock you would see him munching a French roll or a penny loaf—not taking it boldly out of his pocket at once, like a man who knew he was only making a lunch, but breaking off little bits in his pocket, and eating them by stealth. He knew too well it was his dinner.<br /><br />When we first saw this poor object, we thought it quite impossible that his attire could ever become worse. We even went so far as to speculate on the possibility of his shortly appearing in a decent second-hand suit. We knew nothing about the matter; he grew more and more shabby genteel every day. The buttons dropped off his waistcoat one by one; then he buttoned his coat; and when one side of the coat was reduced to the same condition as the waistcoat, he buttoned it over on the other side. He looked somewhat better at the beginning of the week than at the conclusion, because the neck-kerchief, though yellow, was not quite so dingy; and in the midst of all this wretchedness he never appeared without gloves and straps. He remained in this state for a week or two; at length one of the buttons on the back of the coat fell off, and then the man himself disappeared, and we thought he was dead.<br /><br />We were sitting at the same table about a week after his disappearance, and as our eyes rested on his vacant chair, we insensibly fell into a train of meditation on the subject of his retirement from public life. We were wondering whether he had hung himself or thrown himself off a bridge—whether he really was dead, or had only been arrested—when our conjectures were suddenly set at rest by the entry of the man himself. He had undergone some strange metamorphosis, and walked up the centre of the room with an air which showed he was fully conscious of the improvement in his appearance. It was very odd; his clothes were a fine, deep, glossy black, and yet they looked like the same suit; nay, there were the very darns, with which old acquaintance had made us familiar. The hat, too—nobody could mistake the shape of that hat, with its high crown, gradually increasing in circumference towards the top. Long service had imparted to it a reddish-brown tint, but now it was as black as the coat. The truth flashed suddenly upon us—they had been "revived." 'Tis a deceitful liquid that black and blue reviver; we have watched its effects on many a shabby-genteel man. It betrays its victims into a temporary assumption of importance, possibly into the purchase of a new pair of gloves, or a cheap stock, or some other trifling article of dress. It elevates their spirits for a week, only to depress them, if possible, below their original level. It was so in this case; the transient dignity of the unhappy man decreased in exact proportion as the "reviver" wore off. The knees of the unmentionables, and the elbows of the coat, and the seams generally, soon began to get alarmingly white; the hat was once more deposited under the table, and its owner crept into his seat as quietly as ever. There was a week of incessant small rain and mist. At its expiration the "reviver" had entirely vanished, and the shabby-genteel man never afterwards attempted to effect any improvement in his outward appearance.<br /><br />It would be difficult to name any particular part of town as the principal resort of shabby-genteel men. We have met a great many persons of this description in the neighbourhood of the Inns of Court. They may be met with in Holborn, between eight and ten any morning; and whoever has the curiosity to enter the Insolvent Debtors’ Court, will observe, both among spectators and practitioners, a great variety of them. We never went on ‘Change, by any chance, without seeing some shabby-genteel men, and we have often wondered what earthly business they can have there. They will sit there for hours, leaning on great, dropsical, mildewed umbrellas, or eating Abernethy biscuits; nobody speaks to them, nor they to any one. On consideration, we remember to have occasionally seen two shabby-genteel men conversing together on ‘Change; but our experience assures us that this is an uncommon circumstance, occasioned by the offer of a pinch of snuff, or some such civility.<br /><br />It would be a task of equal difficulty either to assign any particular spot for the residence of these beings, or to endeavour to enumerate their general occupations. We were never engaged in business with more than one shabby-genteel man; and he was a drunken engraver, and lived in a damp back parlour, in a new row of houses at Camden-town, half street, half brick-field, somewhere near the canal. A shabby-genteel man may have no occupation at all, or he may be a corn agent, or a coal agent, or a wine agent, or a collector of debts, or a broker’s assistant, or a broken-down attorney. He may be a clerk of the lowest description, or a contributor to the press of the same grade. Whether our readers have noticed these men in their walks as often as we have, we know not; this we know—that the miserably poor man (no matter whether he owes his distresses to his own conduct, or that of others) who feels his poverty, and vainly strives to conceal it, is one of the most pitiable objects in human nature. Such objects, with few exceptions, are "shabby-genteel people."