Dickens, Charles

London is the protagonist of Dickens's fiction, as it defined his popular success. Even as a mature writer Dickens continued to draw on the experience of the young newspaper reporter who had written Sketches by Boz (1836) in his spare time, capitalizing on his walks through the city to outline the different neighborhoods and their distinctive inhabitants. “What inexhaustible food for speculation, do the streets of London afford!” he comments. We “have not the slightest commiseration for the man who can take up his hat and stick, and walk from Covent Garden to St. Paul's Churchyard, and back into the bargain, without deriving some amusement—we had almost said instruction—from his perambulation.” Throughout his career as a novelist, journalist, editor, actor, and theatrical impresario, Dickens found in London an inexhaustible source for the instruction and amusement of his readers, including Queen Victoria. Throughout his life he was a walker in the city, a vagabond of the streets.

His close friend, John Forster, notes that for the young Dickens to walk “anywhere about Covent Garden or the Strand, perfectly entranced him with pleasure. But, most of all, he had a profound attraction of repulsion to St Giles's.” Focusing on the cognitive dissonance generated by the city, this attraction of repulsion became his characteristic London signature. “‘Good Heaven!’ he would exclaim, ‘what wild visions of prodigies of wickedness, and beggary, rose in my mind out of that place.’” This part of the city always evoked his childhood, and all those places in the neighborhood of Warren's Blacking Factory and Hungerford Stairs are central to his writing: Covent Garden, the Temple, St. Giles, Waterloo Bridge, the Strand, and Temple Bar.

Like the Sketches, the humor of Pickwick Papers (1838) illuminates the dark corners of the city's urban labyrinth and would continue to inform his fiction. Published in serial form, either in monthly or weekly installments, the 15 novels he wrote map the city and its characteristic inhabitants. Realism in Dickens's time was magical, for the city was a fairytale come to life: grim, exhilarating, and transformative. To describe this urban world was to create a new Bible, encompassing heaven and earth, and all that lies between.

The first great practitioner of the detective novel, Dickens created a linguistic universe that in the energy, deftness, and surprise of its syntax simulates the theatrical experience of life in the modern city. As we read his writing we participate in the modern theatrical project of urban life: Modern identity has become staged identity.

Like the detectives of the London Metropolitan Police, founded in 1844, whom he admired and wrote about in Household Words, Dickens teaches us how to decode that city world and navigate its darker streets. His fiction trains us in keen and swift observation, careful judgment, and wide-ranging sympathy.

When Dickens was born, on February 7, 1812, London was a city of horse-drawn carts and carriages, which entered through city gates like Charing Gate, NewGate (with its formidable prison), and [Page 218]Kennington Toll Gate. When Dickens died 58 years later in 1870, the gates and city wall had been pulled down and built on, and London turned into a sprawling monumental city, transformed by the Industrial Revolution, especially the railroad and entrepreneurial capitalism as well as the British imperial venture, into the first world-city.

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