Dickens's London
de Peter Clark
No writer can lay claim to making a city the principal character of their novels as Charles Dickens did with London. A near photographic memory made his contact with London indelible from a young age. Though these early hardships required the filter of literature to numb the humiliation he felt about his humble origins. From his Camden Town landlady Elizabeth Roylance finding her way into literary characterization as Mrs. Pipchin in Dombey and Son to the way in which his working day as a young clerk at Gray's Inn informed Bleak House and the appropriation of his colleague Bob Fagin's name to his notorious villain in Oliver Twist, the people and places of Dickens's London are a constant and pervading presence through his novels. From the coaching inns to the lower reaches of the Thames, London was the inexhaustible "character" he was drawn back to again and again. Published amid the two-hundredth anniversary celebrations of Charles Dickens' birth in 1811 and in the wake of the major "Dickens at 200" exhibition at the The Morgan Library and Museum, New York, Dickens's London is a remarkable study of how a city can inform and ignite the imagination. Five walks with maps through Dickensian London make this the perfect accompaniment for a trip to the British capitol.
