Little Dorrit
Book I chapter
23
The little counting-house ... was a room of wood and glass at the end of a long low workshop, filled with benches, and vices, and tools, and straps, and wheels; which, when they were in gear with the steam-engine, went tearing round as though they had a s uicidal mission to grind the business to dust and tear the factory to pieces. A communication of great trap-doors in the floor and roof with the workshop above and the workshop below, made a shaft of light in this perspective, which brought to Clennam's mind the child's old picture-book, where similar rays were the witnesses of Abel's murder. The noises were sufficiently removed and shut out from the counting-house to blend into a busy hum, interspersed with periodical clinks and thumps. The patient figures at work were swarthy with the filings of iron and steel that danced on every bench and bubbled up through every chink in the planking. The workshop was arrived at by a step-ladder from the outer yard below, where it served as a shelter for the larg e grindstone where tools were sharpened. The whole had at once a fanciful and practical air in Clennam's eyes ...
As he comes into the iron country farther north, such fresh green woods as those of Chesney Wold are left behind; and coal pits and ashes, high chimneys and red bricks, blighted verdure, scorching fires, and a heavy never-lightening cloud of smoke, become the features of the scenery. Among such objects rides the trooper ...
At last, on the black canal bridge of a busy town, with a clang of iron in it, and more fires and more smoke than he has seen yet, the trooper, swart with the dust of the coal roads, checks his horse, and asks a workman does he know the name of Rouncewell thereabouts?
"Why, master," quoth the workman, "do I know my own name?"
"'Tis so well known here, is it, comrade?" asks the trooper.
"Rouncewell's? Ah! you're right."
"And where might it be now?" asks the trooper, with a glance before him.
"The bank, the factory, or the house?" the workman wants to know.
"... Should I find Mr Rouncewell at the factory, do you think?"
"Tain't easy to say ..."
And which is the factory? Why, he sees those chimneys Ð the tallest ones! Yes he sees them. Well! let him keep his eye on those chimneys, going on as straight as ever he can, and presently he'll see 'em down a turning on the left, shut in by a g reat brick wall which forms part of the street. That's Rouncewell's.
The trooper thanks his informant, and rides slowly on, looking about him. He does not turn back, but puts up his horse ... at a public house where some of Rouncewell's hands are dining, as the ostler tells him. Some of Rouncewell's hands have just knock ed off for dinner-time, and seem to be invading the whole time. They are very sinewy and strong, are Rouncewell's hands --- a little sooty too.
He comes to a gateway in the brick wall, looks in, and sees a great perplexity of iron lying about, in every stage, and in a vast variety of shapes; in bars, in wedges, in sheets; in tanks, in boilers, in axles, in wheels, in cogs, in cranks, in rails; tw isted and wrenched into eccentric and perverse forms, as separate parts of machinery; mountains of it broken-up, and rusty in its age; distant furnaces of it glowing and bubbling in its youth; bright fireworks of it showering about, under the blows of the steam-hammer; red-hot iron, white-hot iron, cold-black iron; an iron taste, an iron smell, and a Babel of iron sounds.
A long suburb of red brick houses, --- some with patches of garden-ground, where coal-dust and factory smoke darkened the shrinking leaves, and coarse rank flowers; and where the struggling vegetation sickened and sank under the hot breath of kiln and fur nace, making them by its presence seem yet more blighting and unwholesome than in the town itself, --- a long, flat, straggling suburb passed, they came by slow degrees upon a cheerless region, where not a blade of grass was seen to grow; where not a but put forth its promise in the spring; where nothing green could live but on the surface of the stagnant pools, which here and there lay idly sweltering by the black roadside.
Advancing more and more into the shadow of this mournful place, its dark depressing influence stole upon their spirits, and filled them with a dismal gloom. On every side, and as far as the eye could see into the heavy distance, tall chimneys, crowding o n each other and presenting that endless repetition of the same dull, ugly form, which is the horror of oppressive dreams, poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the light, and made foul the melancholy air. On mounds of ashes by the wayside, sheltere d only by a few rough boards, or rotten pent-house roofs, strange engines spun and writhed like tortured creatures; clanking their iron chains, shrinking in their rapid whirl from time to time as though in torment unendurable, and making the ground trembl e with their agonies. Dismantled houses here and there appeared, tottering to the earth, propped up by fragments of others that had fallen down, unroofed, windowless, blackened, desolate, but yet inhabited. Men, women, children, wan in their looks and r agged attire, tended the engines, fed their tributary fires, begged upon the road, or scowled half-naked from the doorless houses. Then came more of the wrathful monsters, whose like they almost seemed to be in their wildness and their untamed air, scree ching and turning round and round again; and still, before, behind, and to the right and left, was the same interminable perspective of brick towers, never ceasing in their black vomit, blasting all things living or inanimate, shutting out the face of day , and closing in on all these horrors with a dense dark cloud.
But night-time in this dreadful spot! --- night, when the smoke was changed to fire; when every chimney spirted up its red flame; and places that had been dark vaults all day, now shone red-hot, with figures moving to and fro within their blazing jaws, an d calling to one another with hoarse cries Ð night, when the noise of every strange machine was aggravated by the darkness; when the people near them looked wilder and more savage; when bands of unemployed labourers paraded in the roads, or clustered by t orchlight round their leaders, who told them in stern language of their wrongs, and urged them on to frightful cries and threats; when maddened men, armed with sword and firebrand, spurning the tears and prayers of women who would restrain them, rushed fo rth on errands of terror and destruction, to work no ruin half so surely as their own --- night, when carts came rumbling by, filled with rude coffins (for contagious disease and death had been busy with the living crops); when orphans cried, and distracted women shrieked and followed in their wake --- night, when some called for bread, and some for drink to drown their cares; and some with tears, and some with staggering feet, and some with bloodshot eyes, went brooding home --- night, which unlike the night that Heaven sends on earth, brought with it not peace, nor quiet, nor signs of blessed sleep --- who shall tell the terrors of the night to that young wandering child!