Art and Literature
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Narrow Street's harsh conditions and extreme poverty attracted the attention of early social reformers and latter political agitation for better working conditions led to the creation of some of London's earliest trade unions.
Its picturesque buildings and atmospheric location abutting onto the River Thames also attracted artists and writers.
- Charles Dickens' godfather Christopher Huffam ran his sail-making business from Newell Street, Limehouse.
- James McNeill Whistler and Charles Napier Hemy sketched and painted at locations on Narrow Streets' river waterfront.
- Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional detective Sherlock Holmes visits an opium den in Limehouse looking for clues.
- George Orwell's book Down and Out in Paris and London features a Limehouse lodging house.
Read more about this topic: Narrow Street
Famous quotes containing the words art and/or literature:
“Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and given them an idea of something better. A better state of one’s feelings or simply the idea of a silence in one’s self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)