London

Piccadilly was an Englishman. He poked up from the peat-black soil of fen country, straight from the deep silt, wetted ash, and ancestral bones, autochthonous and stalky as the asparagus that also grew there. He was reserved, solitary, and fastidious; he was especially particular about the cut of his trousers, the hand and drape of fabric. Tall and slim, he wore his fine, sober clothes with an air of understated, accustomed luxury. At the age of eighteen, Piccadilly moved to London and never left.

The capital and largest city of the United Kingdom, on the Thames River in southeast England. Greater London consists of 32 boroughs surrounding the City of London, built on the site of a Roman outpost named Londinium. Its growth as an important trade center dates from 886, under the rule of Alfred the Great. Since the Elizabethan period (1558-1603) London has dominated its country's political, economic, and cultural life.

Certainly an Englishman, it was more doubtful whether Phileas Fogg was a Londoner. He was never seen on 'Change, nor at the Bank, nor in the counting-rooms of the »City«; no ships ever came into London docks of which he was the owner; he had no public employment; he had never been entered at any of the Inns of Court, either at the Temple, or Lincoln's Inn, or Gray's Inn; nor had his voice ever resounded in the Court of Chancery, or in the Exchequer, or the Queen's Bench, or the Ecclesiastical Courts. He certainly was not a manufacturer; nor was he a merchant or a gentleman farmer. His name was strange to the scientific and learned societies, and he never was known to take part in the sage deliberations of the Royal Institution or the London Institution, the Artisan's Association, or the Institution of Arts and Sciences. He belonged, in fact, to none of the numerous societies which swarm in the English capital, from the Harmonic to that of the Entomologists, founded mainly for the purpose of abolishing pernicious insects.

Ah! He had been in London many a time--used to go there often once, with waggons. It was nigh two-and-thirty year since he had been there last, and he did hear say there were great changes. Like enough! He had changed, himself, since then. Two-and-thirty year was a long time and eighty-four a great age, though there was some he had known that had lived to very hard upon a hundred--and not so hearty as he, neither--no, nothing like it.

The landlady was very much astonished to learn that they had come all the way from London, and appeared to have no little curiosity touching their farther destination.

'You may remember that the day I arrived in London, and found the house to which I drove, empty and deserted, I was directed by some of the neighbours to you, and waited upon you without stopping for rest or refreshment?'

London Bridge is falling down,
falling down, falling down.
London Bridge is falling down,
my fair lady.

It was at least certain that Phileas Fogg had not absented himself from London for many years. Those who were honoured by a better acquaintance with him than the rest, declared that nobody could pretend to have ever seen him anywhere else.