Sorry - I have been keeping up with the reading (by reading a chapter a day before 6am!) but life has been ultra-hectic here over the past few weeks - Anna is involved in so many concerts and competitions just now, plus her Highers/AS Levels, and various other things have been on the go; I think I find all this rushing around far more stressful than I would have done 10 years ago, but I'm not sure if that is age or just the fact that I've got used to my peaceful little life!
Anyway:
Jonathan: "without prejudice" is something that lawyers put at the top of letters if they don't want them to be referred to in court. For example, if you are being sued, and you want to try to stop the case going to court (which is of course very expensive), you might offer a sum of money to the other side to make them settle. BUT is they refuse that offer, and insist on taking you to court, you do not want them to bring your letter out in court, because it could be taken as a sign that you think you were in the wrong. Insurance companies' lawyers do it all the time - "we will offer you £10,000 to settle now - without prejudice". This puts the other person on the back foot, as if they take the money, they will always think that they might have done better in court, but if they don't take it, and they go into court, they might not only get nothing, but end up having to pay both sides' horrendous legal costs (traditionally, the loser in court pays a large part of everyone's costs). Also, if you proceed to court and win, but are awarded less than the offer that was made earlier, you can be stung for the other side's costs from the date on which the first offer was made - because you should have taken it and saved everyone's time and money. Insurance companies are geniuses at working the system like this.
Re the map - I had a look at it. I think in Dickens' time things were obviously very different - abject squalor existed cheek by jowl with affluence. Even in my childhood, large parts of London were slums - but nowadays just about anywhere within easy reach of the centre has been yuppified and is horribly expensive. The kind of people who would have lived in the slums in even the 1960s/70s now live in the outer suburbs, which in my childhood were v respectable, but have now become quite dreadful in some cases. Many of them were moved out by councils eager to sell off valuable sites. My own cousin used to live in a nice council flat in Camberwell, a part of London that my mother would almost have died rather than live in - the council persuaded them to accept a flat outside London, so that the block (it was a solid 1950s building, not a high rise monstrosity) could be redeveloped and sold off. Camberwell, like Brixton, Dalston, Hackney, Islington, etc has become very des res and expensive owing simply to its proximity to the centre.
So yes, Tulkinghorn could have lived in a very smart house just walking distance from a slum - and of course in those days slums were a lot worse than they are now, although maybe not as threatening, I don't know.
And there are still parts of inner London that are very poor indeed. In the 1980s I worked in the Elephant & Castle - only 10 miles from the suburb in which I grew up - and I had honestly never seen such poverty in this country. In the morning there were long queues of people waiting for their benefits, some of them just stood there in their carpet slippers. I had clients who came to ask me about buying their council flats - the 'right to buy' was a big thing back them - and when I worked out what it would cost them to repay very small loans (if you had lived in the property for a long time, you bought it at a massive discount - people who did this then sold the flats on at massive profits just 3 years later, it was an appalling policy and decimated London's public housing stock) - they were horrified, as they could hardly afford to pay their utility bills. Some people made a lot of quick profit at that time, but others simply could not afford to do so; they could hardly afford to live.
Rosemary
