The Honest Tradesman.
Andrew Sanders · 2021
Charon was not a ‘heathen rustic’, and it is just possible that the rustic ‘on duty’ for ‘several centuries’ is a statue of a river-god. The most likely candidate is the statue known as Marforio, an antique marble which was installed in the Capitol in Rome in the seventeenth century. Marforio dominates the courtyard at the Palazzo dei Conservatori, overlooking a fountain and its basin, where Dickens could have seen it during his visit in 1844. The statue was once much copied as a garden ornament. The old church of Saint Pancras is the ancient parish church situated on the north side of the road leading from King’s Cross to Kentish Town, and the centre of the most extensive parish in the county of Middlesex.