_Sebastiao Salgado_
_Be This a Warning!_
_This little work is held up as a warning beacon to keep the traveller from the sands of a poisonous desert, or from splitting upon the rocks of infamy._
_It is necessary in such a case to point out 'hells' and brothels, girls and bawds, and rogues, by name and situation, not as a direction for youth to steer towards them, but that he may take the contrary course – for no reasonable man would enter a whirlpool, when he could pass by it on the smooth surface o' the reaches of a tranquil river crossing._
_The life of Ikey Solomon is filled with iniquitous adventure; he has acted with the rope round his neck for twenty years, but by his cunning always avoided being drawn up to the beam, where he is likely to end his infamous career._
_We are duty bound to hold him up as a depraved villain, whose conduct must disgust, and whose miseries, with all his wealth, will show how preferable a life of honesty and poverty is to a guilty conscience, and treasure gained by blood and rapine._
_From Ikey Solomon, Swindler, Forger, Fencer amp; Brothel Keeper, 1829_
Book One
London
Chapter One
Ikey Solomon was so entirely a Londoner that he was a human part of the great metropolis, a jigsawed brick that fitted into no other place. He was mixed into that mouldy mortar, an ingredient in the slime and smutch of its rat-infested dockside hovels and verminous netherkens. He was a part of its smogged countenance and the dark, cold mannerisms of the ancient city itself. He was contained within the clinging mud and the evil-smelling putrilage. Ikey was as natural a part of the chaffering, quarrelling humanity who lived in the rookeries among the slaughterhouses, cesspools and tanneries as anyone ever born in the square mile known to be the heartbeat of London Town.