Charles Dickens' London

Dickens wrote all-encompassing novels which give us a vivid image of the size, condition and character of London and Londoners in the 19th century.

London: Dickens' Inspiration

London, its streets and its people provided an enormous inspiration for Dickens.

Indeed, when he was away from London, he found it difficult to write. "A day in London sets me up again and starts me. But the toil and labour of writing, day after day, without that magic lantern, is IMMENSE!!'

Dickens' London

Dickens' fascination with London came from the many places he lived in during his lifetime. In any biography of Dickens, you can follow the author from street to street.

The London of Dickens' fiction is physically Georgian London, but a Georgian London given a newly intense charge by its burgeoning Victorian population.

Despite the transformation of London's cityscape in the later 19th and 20th century, Dickens would undoubtedly still recognise much of London today, including:

• The Bank of England: referred to in many of Dickens' works
• British Museum: where David and Steerforth visit in David Copperfield
• Covent Garden: mentioned in David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Little Dorrit, and The Pickwick Papers
• The Guildhall: Mr Pickwick (Pickwick Papers) is tried here for breaching a promise of marriage to his landlady (and then consigned to the Fleet debtors' prison, which was originally on Farringdon Street)
• The Monument: referred to in Martin Chuzzlewit, Barnaby Rudge and David Copperfield
• Westminster Abbey: where Pip and Herbert Pocket attend services in Great Expectations

Dickens' A Christmas Carol also mentions some familiar London landmarks: St Paul's Cathedral, Mansion House, Cornhill in the City of London and Bob Cratchit's Camden Town.

In A Christmas Carol, there's also an example of Dickens' more cryptic descriptions of London. Scrooge's office is said to be near "the ancient tower of a church, whose gruff old bell was always peeping slyly down at Scrooge out of a Gothic window in the wall". The church Dickens describes is thought to be St Michael's Church in the City of London; the author places Scrooge's office in one of the little courts and alleys nearby.

A Christmas Carol in Camden Town

In Stave 3 of A Christmas Carol, the Ghost of Christmas Present leads Scrooge to Camden Town. Dickens' description of the street gives a great insight into London in those early Victorian days:

"The poulterers' shops were still half open, and the fruiterers' were radiant in their glory. There were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers' benevolence to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people's mouths might water gratis as they passed..."

Charles Dickens Museum

For an authentic Dickensian experience, visit the Charles Dickens Museum in London, which is the only surviving London home of Dickens (from 1837 until 1839).

On four floors, you can see paintings, rare editions, manuscripts, original furniture and many items relating to the life of the author of A Christmas Carol. The museum's current special exhibitions include:

• Ignorance and Want: the Social Conscience of Charles Dickens
• Shadow of Guillotine: 150 Years A Tale of Two Cities