London matters less as a stable home than as a city Sumner repeatedly approaches through failure, memory, and possibility. He arrives there after military disgrace looking for medical work, walks its streets under the influence of opium, and later hears that a professional contact might find him employment there. Near the end, London belongs to a different prospect: a place he imagines leaving behind as he plans to disappear into Europe. Across these returns, the city is at once a professional gatekeeper, the setting for a violent confrontation, and a destination from which Sumner hopes to escape.

Professional Rejection and Exile

During a period of two weeks in London, Sumner visits hospitals each morning carrying his diplomas and outdated letters of introduction. He sits waiting in their corridors, but the evidence gives no sign that his credentials open a path back into medical practice. The quiet repetition of the visits makes rejection a routine rather than a single decisive refusal: he presents the documents that attest to his training, yet remains an applicant waiting to be received.

In the evenings, he seeks out acquaintances from Belfast and Galway—not close friends, but men likely to remember him. Over whiskey and ale, they advise him to try America, Mexico, or Brazil, where, they suggest, a man’s past may weigh less heavily. Their manner is friendly and even companionable, but Sumner understands that they want him gone. His disgrace serves as a warning to them as well as a reason to distance themselves: they see in his downfall a possible version of their own. London therefore registers not only the failure of his career but the social isolation that follows it. Even sympathetic company offers no place to remain.

At night, Sumner takes opium and walks until he is tired enough to sleep. London becomes a route through which he tries to wear himself down, not a refuge from the disappointments of the day. The contrast is stark: mornings are spent waiting inside hospitals with professional documents; nights are spent walking the city in search of exhaustion. The repeated pattern links his dependence on opium to the same stalled condition that governs his attempts to resume medical work.

Fleet Street and the Encounter with Corbyn

One evening, Sumner walks along Fleet Street, passes Temple Bar and the Courts of Justice, and sees Corbyn approaching in campaign medals and red dress uniform. Corbyn is laughing and talking with a younger officer. Sumner waits in the shadow of a doorway, and the sight brings back Corbyn’s conduct at the court-martial: Sumner remembers him as casual and unconcerned, with the power to shape or suppress the truth.

As the officers pass, Sumner steps out, taps Corbyn on the epaulette, and strikes him across the face. The younger officer drops his cheroot and stares. The account establishes the assault but does not give its further consequences. London is thus the setting where a memory of institutional injury turns into an immediate act: the courts Sumner passes are part of the city’s landscape, while the remembered court-martial supplies the grievance behind his attack. The episode does not show his professional standing restored; instead, it places his unresolved anger into a public encounter.

Medical Knowledge and a Possible Return

London also appears in Sumner’s account of a surgical procedure he has never performed or witnessed himself. He has read about a man named Hancock carrying it out at Charing Cross Hospital some years earlier, on an occasion when the patient survived. The reference makes the city a source of medical precedent: Sumner’s knowledge is textual and secondhand, grounded in a reported operation rather than his own experience. It also shows that London’s hospitals remain present in his thinking even after his attempts to secure work there have failed.

Later, Jacob Baxter offers a more practical connection. He knows a surgeon in London, James Gregory, whom he describes as able to find Sumner something that pays. Baxter proposes writing to Gregory, arranging for Sumner to stay at the Pilgrim’s Arms, and sending him by train once a reply arrives. He also argues that the whaling trade is declining and that London is a better prospect for a young, capable man than Hull. Sumner responds by asking for the wages Baxter owes him. The exchange makes the proposed move conditional: it depends on Baxter’s letter and Gregory’s response, and it begins with Sumner insisting on money already due rather than simply accepting rescue.

London as a Point of Departure

By the time Sumner is travelling across the moors with Baxter’s money, London is no longer the destination he has in mind. He expects the reports from Hull to reach Pickering before long and believes he has roughly a day to reach the coast and find a ship eastward to Holland or Germany. There, he plans to use the money to disappear, take a new name, and adopt another profession. This remains his expectation, not a confirmed outcome. London’s significance lies in that reversal: the city once represented a hoped-for return to medical employment, but the later plan defines escape in terms of going beyond it. Its narrative role is to mark successive possibilities for Sumner—work, confrontation, and finally the wish to erase the identity with which he arrived.