Wallas & Co. pharmacy, 45 New Cavendish Street, London. Watercolour.

"New Cavendish Street. ... No. 45 retains an early shopfront, of c.1820, with pairs of Ionic columns, indicative of the commercial nature of this end of the street in late-Georgian times. The core of the house itself, now of six storeys, may well be earlier, though the whole premises were substantially rebuilt in the 1890s. It was here that H. T. Hodgson’s ‘British & Foreign’ subscription library was based during the early half of the nineteenth century (as 9 Great Marylebone Street), with a reading room described as offering ‘superior advantages’ to London’s crowded clubs and public institutions. In addition to use of the reading room, subscribers (at five guineas a year, or three guineas a half-year) could also receive new works by post, ‘whether resident in Town or Country’. It was at Hodgson’s that Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning met in September 1846 a week after their secret marriage in Marylebone parish church before heading to Nine Elms for the first leg of their trip to a new life in Italy. After 1900 the shop was for more than fifty years the premises of the chemists and pharmaceutical manufacturers Wallas & Co., founded in Oxford Street in 1897" (Survey of London, loc. cit.)