Thank you for all your suggestions, which I’ve been taking a close look at. It appeared from the 1832 and 1842 street directories that Virginia Terrace might have been quite a small street, but the number of families there in the 1841 census (I make it 22 in all - and have transcribed them all) indicates otherwise. The number of property owners who took out fire insurance (as per the TNA records), as well as the number of households where there was more than one servant, suggests that Virginia Terrace was a reasonably prosperous neighbourhood.
I agree that a good candidate for the anonymous author would be the solicitor Horatio William Davison (said to be aged 35 in the 1841 census) or, perhaps more likely, his father, Richard Davison (aged 65 in 1841). The ‘google books’ reference indicates that Horatio was living in Virginia Terrace in 1836 – the year before publication of ‘A History of Winchcombe’ - and the census shows that he was still there in 1841. Indeed, thanks to Ancestry we can see that in his 1833 articles of clerkship Horatio gave his address as Great Dover Street, Southwark, his master being Anthony Brown, solicitor of the High Court of Chancery, of Mincing Lane, City of London. [But that means that HWD would have been about 27 when he commenced his five years of articles, which seems quite old for an apprentice].
I’ve looked in Ancestry, but to no avail, for articles of clerkship for Richard Davison (father of Horatio), but that doesn’t mean he definitely wasn’t a lawyer. The British Newspaper Archives has a few hits for a Richard Davison, attorney, but he was in Ireland. Is there any way of establishing whether a Richard Davison was a London attorney in the late 18th C /early 19th C? Also, are there any maps of Great Dover Street in the first half of the 19th C which might show where Virginia Terrace was?
ROB