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8 A SHABBY GENTEEL STORY
good fellow in his prosperity, came forward, and furnished a house,
in which they placed him, and came to see and comfort him. Then
they came to see him not quite so often ; then they found out that
Mrs. Gann was a sad tyrant, and a silly woman ; then the ladies
declared her to be insupportable, and Gann to be a low tipsy
fellow : and the gentlemen could but shake their heads, and admit
that the charge was true. Then they left off coming to see him
altogether ; for such is the way of the world, where many of us
have good impulses, and are generous on an occasion, but are
wearied by perpetual want, and begin to grow angry at its importunities—being
very properly vexed at the daily recurrence of
hunger, and the impudent unreasonableness of starvation. Gann,
then, had a genteel wife and children, a furnished house, and a
hundred pounds a year. How should he live 1 The wife of James
Gann, Esq., would never allow him to demean himself by taking a
clerk's place ; and James himself, being as idle a fellow as ever was
known, was fain to acquiesce in this determination of hers, and
to wait for some more genteel employment. And a curious list of
such genteel employments might be made out, were one inclined to
follow this interesting subject far; shabby compromises with the
world, into which poor fellows enter, and still fondly talk of their
" position," and strive to imagine that they are really working for
their bread.
Numberless lodging-houses are kept by the females of families
who have met with reverses : are not " boarding-houses, with a
select musical society, in the neighbourhood of the squares,"
maintained by such ? Do not the gentlemen of the boarding-houses
issue forth every morning to the City, or make believe to go thither,
on some mysterious business which they have? After a certain
period, Mrs. James Gann kept a lodging-house (in her own words,
received " two inmates into her family "), and Mr. Gann had his
mysterious business.
In the year 1835, when this story begins, there stood in a
certain back street in the town of Margate a house on the door of
which might be read, in gleaming brass, the name of MR. GANN.
It was the work of a single smutty servant-maid to clean this brass
plate every morning, and to attend as far as possible to the wants
of Mr. Gann, his family, and lodgers ; and his house being not very
far from the sea, and as you might, by climbing up to the roof, get
a sight between two chimneys of that multitudinous element, Mrs.
Gann set down her lodgings as fashionable; and declared on her
cards that her house commanded "a fine view of the sea."
On the wire window-blind of the parlour was written, in large
characters, the word OFFICE ; and here it was that Gann's services