Dickens's London

The works of Charles Dickens are especially associated with London, which is the setting for many of his novels. These works do not just use London as a backdrop but are about the city and its character.

Dickens described London as a magic lantern, a popular entertainment of the Victorian era, which projected images from slides. Of all Dickens's characters, "none played as important a role in his work as that of London itself"; it fired his imagination and made him write. In a letter to John Forster in 1846, Dickens wrote "a day in London sets me up and starts me", but outside of the city, "the toil and labour of writing, day after day, without that magic lantern is IMMENSE!!"

Many of the identifiable London locations that Dickens used in his work no longer exist, although scholar Clare Pettitt notes that it is still possible to "track Dickens' London, and see where things were".

In addition to his later novels and short stories, Dickens's descriptions of London, published in various newspapers in the 1830s, were released as a collected edition Sketches by Boz in 1836. Dickens's first son, also called Charles Dickens, wrote a popular guidebook to London called Dickens's Dictionary of London in 1879.

Locations

Pickwick Papers

Dickens's first novel The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (also known as The Pickwick Papers) follows the travels of the club's members around England and, between them, they stay in over one hundred Inns during their journeys. A selection of those in the London area, including the George and Vulture in Lombard Street and the Golden Cross at Charing Cross, were the subject of Bertram Waldrom

Matz's 1921 book The inns & taverns of "Pickwick", with some observations on their other associations, and still feature on Pub crawl guides today.

Oliver Twist

When Oliver joins the Artful Dodger to travel to Fagin's lair, they make their way through a series of streets until they reach the neighbourhood of Saffron Hill.