neral
Post-Office.

The population return of 1831 shows a plan with a circle drawn eight miles
from the centre, a region which then comprised 1,776,000 inhabitants. By
1841 the circle was reduced to a radius of one-half, and the population
was still as great as that contained in the larger circle of a decade
before. Thus the history of the growth of London shows that its greatest
activities came with the beginning of the Victorian era.

By the census of 1861, the population of the City--the E. C. District--was
only 112,247; while including that with the entire metropolis, the number
was 2,803,034, or _twenty-five times_ as great as the former. It may here
be remarked that the non-resident, or, more properly, "non-sleeping"
population of the City is becoming larger every year, on account of the
substitution of public buildings, railway stations and viaducts, and large
warehouses, in place of ordinary dwelling-houses. Fewer and fewer people
_live_ in the City. In 1851, the number was 127,869; it lessened by more
than 15,000 between that year and 1861; while the population of the
_whole_ metropolis increased by as many as 440,000 in the same space of
time.

In 1870, when Dickens was still living, the whole population was computed
at 3,251,804, and the E. C. population was further reduced to 74,732.

In 1901 the "City" contained only 3,900 inhabited houses, and but 27,664
persons composed the night population.

The territorial limits or extent of London must vary greatly according as
to whether one refers to "The City," "London proper," or "Greater London,"
a phrase which is generally understood of the people as comprehending not
only the contiguous suburbs of a city, but those residential communities
closely allied thereto, and drawing, as it were, their support from it. If
the latter, there seems no reason why London might not well be thought to
include pretty much all of Kent and Surrey,--the home counties lying
immediately south of the Thames,--though in reality one very soon gets
into green fields in this direction, and but for the ominous signs of the
builder and the enigmatic references of the native to the "city" or
"town," the stranger, at least, might think himself actually far from the
madding throng.

For a fact this is not so, and local life centres, even now, as it did in
days gone by, very much around the happenings of the day in London itself.

Taking it in its most restricted and confined literal sen