ABSTRACT
Till our second return from the West Indies we had always lived in furnished houses or at the boarding house which I have before spoken of. In the spring of 1843 (after three months' stay in a furnished house in Sloane Street) we furnished a house on the south side of Cadogan Place and occupied it for 10 years. Incredible as it may seem now, Sloane Street formed then to a great extent a boundary line for London. Close out of it, to the West, in Cadogan Terrace there were actual fields, a wheat field (or was it rye?) in 1843, succeeded by oats, some years later on by a nursery ground for the commoner flowers—the purple stocks, I remember, were quite a blaze of colour—afterwards for the more expensive plants. But by 1853 the ground was already marked out to be built over… [My after pseudonym ‘John Townsend’ was suggested by the then position of our town.]
