London Bridge is both a vital connection and a point of passage in the novel: at the time depicted, it is London’s only bridge, linking the city to Southwark, and later becomes the meeting place for an unexplained summons to Gwynplaine.

Setting and Built Environment

The bridge joins London to Southwark, then a suburb paved with flint pebbles taken from the Thames and divided into small streets and alleys. Houses, dwellings, and wooden huts crowd together there in a dense mixture of combustible buildings. The narrator presents the danger as more than theoretical: the Great Fire of London in 1666 had shown how readily fire could take hold amid such congestion. Southwark’s scale is also changing; it was once a village, though substantial trade already took place along the river, where rings in the old wall secured barges.

The account pauses over the names as well as the place. Southwark was then pronounced Soudric, while the narrator gives a contemporary approximation of Sousouorc and jokes about the difficulty of pronouncing English names. This linguistic aside makes the setting feel historically distant even as the bridge supplies a clear physical link between its two sides.

The Bridge as a Meeting Place

Later, Gwynplaine recognizes the Duchess Josiana’s page, who tells him to be at the corner of London Bridge at the same hour the following day. The page promises to conduct him to a place where he is expected, but does not name that destination. The bridge thus becomes a threshold in the action: the summons fixes a time and a public meeting point, while leaving Gwynplaine—and the reader—without an explanation of what awaits beyond it.