The System of the World. A key scene in A Handful of Dust, by Evelyn Waugh, takes place in a nightclub in the fictional Sink Street, "off" Golden Square. Confessions Of An English Opium Eater by Thomas De Quincey sees the protagonist part from the square and for the last time from Anne, the prostitute with whom he falls in love. A verbal tradition was seized upon for the Hulu series Harlots to host the home and business of fictional "bawd" (brothel keeper) Lydia Quigley; the square itself was not used for filming. Multiple characters utter the square's name as a metonym (shorthand) to refer to her business. Charles Dickens' works "David Copperfield" and The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. In the latter it is the square where Ralph Nickleby lives in a spacious house and has his "establishment.": Although a few members of the graver professions live about Golden Square, it is not exactly in anybody's way to or from anywhere. It is one of the squares that have been; a quarter of the town that has gone down in the world, and taken to letting lodgings. Many of its first and second floors are let, furnished, to single gentlemen; and it takes boarders besides. It is a great resort of foreigners. The dark-complexioned men who wear large rings, and heavy watch-guards, and bushy whiskers, and who congregate under the Opera Colonnade, and about the box-office in the season, between four and five in the afternoon, when they give away the orders,--all live in Golden Square, or within a street of it. Two or three violins and a wind instrument from the Opera band reside within its precincts. Its boarding-houses are musical, and the notes of pianos and harps float in the evening time round the head of the mournful statue, the guardian genius of a little wilderness of shrubs, in the centre of the square. On a summer's night, windows are thrown open, and groups of swarthy moustached men are seen by the passer-by, lounging at the casements, and smoking fearfully. Sounds of gruff voices practising vocal music invade the evening's silence; and the fumes of choice tobacco scent the air. There, snuff and cigars, and German pipes and flutes, and violins and violoncellos, divide the supremacy between them. It is the region of song and smoke. Street bands are on their mettle in Golden Square; and