Millbank is the desolate waterside setting of Martha’s crisis and rescue. At the end of her hurried walk through Westminster, David Copperfield and Daniel Peggotty find her beside the river, where its ruined surroundings seem to echo her isolation and where the river has become, in her imagination, the natural companion of a life marked by disgrace and loss.

Setting and Approach

David and Daniel encounter Martha coming toward them near Westminster Abbey, then turn back to follow her. She moves through the streams of pedestrians near the bridge and into a narrow waterside street by Millbank, crossing the road when she hears them behind her and quickening her pace. David initially hopes she is heading to a house connected with the missing Emily, but the glimpse of water through a gateway makes him fear she intends to go no farther than the river.

The narrative fixes the scene at the end of the low-lying street, where it gives way to a road running between houses and the river. A dilapidated wooden building, thought to have once been a ferry-house, stands there. When Martha reaches the water, she stops as if she has arrived at her destination and walks slowly along its edge, looking intently into it.

A Landscape of Ruin

Millbank is presented at night as oppressive, lonely, and physically degraded. The road near the great blank Prison has neither wharves nor houses; a sluggish ditch deposits mud against the prison walls, while coarse grass and rank weeds spread over marshland. Unfinished houses rot nearby, and the ground is cluttered with discarded industrial equipment, including boilers, wheels, anchors, and furnaces, partly sunk into wet soil.

The riverside is no less inhospitable. Slimy gaps and causeways wind through old piles toward the ebb-tide; decaying matter clings to the timber, and old handbills offering rewards for drowned men flutter above the high-water mark. The narrator reports a local story that one of the pits dug for the dead during the Great Plague lay in the area. Whether or not that story accounts for the place’s appearance, its accumulation of mud, refuse, abandoned objects, and reminders of drowning makes Millbank feel like a landscape abandoned to decay.

Martha at the River

The setting becomes an immediate danger when Martha stands alone at the brink. David and Daniel approach under cover of stranded boats and barges. David calls to her, but she screams and struggles with a strength that makes him doubt he could hold her alone. Daniel’s stronger hand joins his; together they take her away from the water and lay her on dry stones. Shaken, she sits holding her head and repeatedly cries out about the river.

Martha explains her identification with the water through its course: it comes from the countryside, creeps through dirty and miserable streets, and runs toward a troubled sea. She feels that she must go with it. The river is thus not merely a perilous physical presence but the image through which she describes a life she considers stained and outcast. Yet her despair is complicated by remorse and affection. She says she had no part in Emily’s flight, recalls that Emily was always kind to her, and grieves that she was separated from her. She fears that people will think she corrupted Emily, although she would have given her life to restore Emily’s good name.

Narrative Significance

Millbank brings landscape, social judgment, and action into a single scene. Its refuse-strewn riverbank seems to place Martha among the discarded things of the city, reflecting the stigma she bears without making her guilty of Emily’s disappearance. Her own account supplies a moral counterpoint to that appearance: she is distressed by her own past and the prejudice directed at her, but also remembers Emily’s kindness and insists on her innocence in Emily’s flight.

The location turns concern into intervention. David and Daniel do not leave Martha alone at the water; they reach her, pull her back from the brink, and hear her grief. Millbank therefore marks both the extremity of her isolation and the moment when that isolation is interrupted by recognition and practical aid.