The Three Cripples Tavern, Little Saffron Hill, Holborn

This watercolour depicts The Three Cripples Tavern, Little Saffron Hill, Holborn. Dickens described it in Oliver Twist Chapter 8 as a densely populated area between Holborn and Clerkenwell.

'Thence into Little Saffron Hill, and so into Saffron Hill the Great...A dirtier or more wretched place he (Oliver) had never seen. The street was very narrow and muddy, and the air was impregnated with filthy odours...The sole places that seemed to prosper around the general blight of the place were the public houses; and in them the lowest order of Irish were wrangling with might and main. Covered ways and yards, which here and there diverged from the main street, disclosed little knots of houses where drunken men and women were positively walking in filth; and from several of the doorways great ill-looking fellows were cautiously emerging, bound, to all appearance, on no very well-disguised or harmless errands.'

Very little is known about James Lawson Stewart who exhibited watercolours in various London galleries between 1883-1889. He died in c. 1918 and towards the end of life was employed to copy prints of London; the accuracy of some of the locations should therefore be questioned.

The Museum was gifted a large selection of watercolours featuring locations which appeared in Dickens's works in 1934 and a set of cigarette cards was issued by R and J Hill Ltd in 1926 and 1934 entitled Historic Places from Dickens Classics which featured watercolours by Stewart.