Dickens, contrary to our easy assumptions, was not a Victorian, or not just a Victorian. He was born in the reign of George III, although by now the old king was permanently mad, as well as deaf and blind: the Regency had been declared the previous year, and the Prince Regent set the rackety and louche tone of the upper reaches of society. In 1820, when Dickens was still a boy in Chatham, the Regent inherited the throne as George IV; he was nineteen when the old stone London Bridge, a symbol of London for 600 years, was replaced. Even as his writing career took off, the new era had not properly begun: as Bill Sikes is hunted down at the end of Oliver Twist, his pursuers demand that the door be opened ‘in the king’s name’. By the time the eighteen-year-old Victoria came to the throne in 1837, Dickens was twenty-five years old, an established author, a magazine editor and a married man with a family. His was the London of rackety beginnings, of Regency grandiosity, as well as of early Victorian earnestness and endeavour, expansionism and technological advancement.

 

The High Street, Southwark, with a new road being laid. Some of the older buildings are held up only by wooden props – a common feature across the city.

 

All of these things Dickens was to describe as though no one had ever seen them before. And after he described them, no one could ever see them again except through his eyes. Dickens’ London was a place of the mind, but it was also a real place. It had reality, and much of what we take today to be the marvellous imaginings of a visionary novelist turn out on inspection to be the reportage of a great looker-on: give Dickens the name of almost any street, his contemporaries said, and he could ‘tell you all that is in it, what each shop was, what the grocer’s name was, and how many scraps of orange-peel there were on the pavement’. These streets were a hive of activity, a route for commuters, a passage from home to work and work to home. But they were also a place of work itself, as well as a place of leisure and of amusement. The streets had purpose to them, they were a destination as well as a means of reaching a destination.

 

Street-advertising: note the handbills, as well as the boards promoting
various exhibitions and products (and one election campaign, far left).

 

And within the single entity called London, many Londons were occurring simultaneously. At two in the morning at a street-vendor’s coffee-stall, young men on a night out might look for prostitutes, whom they might confuse with a milliner’s drudge returning home after another sixteen-hour-day, who in turn had passed street-children sleeping on doorsteps and under the railway arches; they, in their turn, foraged at four in the morning in the market refuse for their breakfast, nimbly avoiding the carriages of the wealthy, who were returning home from assemblies and balls, crossing the paths of the watercress-sellers heading for the markets before dawn, so that they could be on their suburban selling routes by six, to supply the households of the now-sleeping young men with their breakfast greens. Similarly London could be measured in hours as well as space, physically and metaphorically. Covent Garden was the location of the market and also the thriving vice trade; it was the centre that fed the populace and it also contained two of London’s most important theatres. Drury Lane, behind the market, was a byword for poverty and filth, while the Lowther Arcade, a few hundred yards away, was the haunt of the wealthy who lounged their days away looking at luxury goods to buy.

 

Cows were frequently kept in London; some can be seen at the back of this shop,
with more in the cellar (note the hay being delivered, left).

 

What was imagination and what reportage, has, as the city changed, blurred and become hard to distinguish. Jokes that Dickens’ readers would have understood, dry asides on the streets he and they walked so regularly for us lie deeply buried. Dickens’ London is an attempt to bring these details to the surface once more, to look at the streets of London as Dickens and his fellow-Londoners saw it, to examine its workings, to take a walk, in effect, through the city as it appeared in Dickens’ lifetime, from 1812 to 1870.

 

Mr Micawber, the young David Copperfield’s feckless but faithful friend, offered his services on David’s first day in London: ‘Under the impression...that your peregrinations in this metropolis have not as yet been extensive, and that you might have some difficulty in penetrating the arcana of the Modern Babylon...in short...that you might lose yourself – I shall be happy to call this evening, and install you in the knowledge of the nearest way.’ The arcana of the modern Babylon: like Mr Micawber, Dickens reveals to his readers the occult secrets of London, installing in us, his readers, the knowledge of the nearest, and best, way. The least we can do is follow him.

 

Dickens’ London: Everyday Life in the Victorian City is published by Atlantic Books in autumn 2012.