Piccadilly Circus is an intersection in West London that connects Regent Street to other throughways of London. (Survey of London.) Most notably it joined Regent Street to Shaftesbury Avenue after the latters completion in 1886. After this, Piccadilly Circus lost its circular shape.

As we can see from the Booth Archive, Piccadilly Circus in the late 1890s was a middle-class neighborhood with well-off inhabitants.

It is also where the heroine of the story “In Dull Brown” by Evelyn Sharp, Jean, gets off the omnibus and goes to work as a tutor for a wealthy family. This exemplifies the class different between Jean and her suitor, Tom Unwin. Tom may get off at this stop in the hopes of seeing her because he has no other demands on his time. But for Jean, the only time she will see Piccadilly is for her business. And even then she does not have all the time in the world to chat with Tom. She is constantly aware of the limit to her personal time. Piccadilly acts like a barrier between Jean and Tom. On one side of it she is a woman free to go about as she pleases, but on the other she is an worker who must always be aware of how she might be viewed by her employer. At one point Jean frets over the bad example she would be if her students saw her talking with a strange man she was never introduced with. While Piccadilly Circus may connect East and West London, what it means to Jean is a division between her and Tom.

 

Sharp, Evelyn. “In Dull Brown.” The Yellow Book 8 (January 1896): 181-200. The Yellow Nineties Online. Ed. Dennis Denisoff and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra. Ryerson University, 2012. Web. [Date of access]. http://1890s.ca/HTML.aspx?s=YBV8_sharp_dull.html

‘The rebuilding of Piccadilly Circus and the Regent Street Quadrant.’ Survey of London: Volumes 31 and 32, St James Westminster, Part 2. Ed. F H W Sheppard. London: London County Council, 1963. 85-100. British History Online. Web. 9 September 2015. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vols31-2/pt2/pp85-100.

“Booth Poverty Map & Modern Map (Charles Booth Online Archive).” Booth Poverty Map & Modern Map (Charles Booth Online Archive). N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Sept. 2015.