Learn more about the London locations Dickens wrote about
Dickens' genius was thrust upon the world stage at a time of intense change in London and probably none more dramatic than that of the coming of the railroad. This change can be seen in the progress of Dickens' novels.
The quaint coaching inns of Pickwick Papers gave way, in later novels, to reports of railway travel, particularly in Dombey and Son (serialized Oct 1846 to April 1848) where the intrusion of the railroad, and its effects on the city, are described in some detail.
Starting in the late 1830s, competing railway companies burrowed into London as far as possible, displacing the poor, and then building a terminus. The result was a ring of railway stations such as London Bridge Station (1836), Euston Station (1837), and Paddington Station (1838) with no central connection. This increased congestion in the city, as connections had to be made by coach.
Railway Stations were considered "Modern Day Cathedrals" and contained elegant hotels. As railway travel became more affordable, and traffic increased, cheaper and seedier hotels grew up around the stations and the elegant hotels lost business.
Dickens lamented the changes wrought by the railroads but, like most Victorians, accepted the change as a necessity in his travels. His faith in the railways was severely shaken when he was involved in a serious accident at Staplehurst in 1865.
Dickens' London Links
London Fog - USEPA
Shillings? Farthings? Ha'pennies?? What the heck was Dickens talking about?
Pictures of coins of the period
Whatever happened to the London Bridge of Dickens' time? - It's in...Arizona?
The Crystal Palace - The 1851 Great Exhibition was the first World's Fair
London 1865 - The Dickens Project's Our Mutual Friend Site
Dickens' House Museum - Dickens' home at 48 Doughty Street, London (1837-1839)
Spartacus-19th Century London
History of the Workhouse
1859 London Map - From UCLA with annotations and links to an 1827 map, an 1889 map, as well as a current map of London
Hidden London-Dickens
Tyburn Tree-Public Executions in Early Modern London
London Prints - Corporation of London
The Victorian Dictionary - Lee Jackson
Dickens Dictionary 1879
City of Shadows - Elizabeth Stegenga
Ragged School Museum
London Ancestor - Great Stuff!
Throughout his work Dickens relishes in the description of food and drink in such a way as to make the most meager meal seem a feast. From Pip and Joe comparing slices of bread in Great Expectations to the Ghost of Christmas Present's magnificent spread, Dickens celebrates the culinary delights of his day. There is much roast fowl and joint of mutton, plum pudding and boiled beef.
Drinking is ubiquitous in Dickens. From the peasants in Paris soaking up the spilled wine in the street in A Tale of Two Cities to Mr. Micawber's famous punch, everyone seems to have a drink in their hand. This partly reflects the fact that, in Dickens' London, alcohol was safer to drink than the water.
Dickens, by all indications, was a moderate drinker himself. While diligently pointing out the evils of overindulgence, he also had no patience with the Temperance Movement, which he lampooned in Pickwick Papers. Indeed Dickens had a falling out with his friend and illustrator George Cruikshank when Cruikshank, formerly a heavy drinker, became a zealous supporter of abstinence.
In reply to a letter from an irate advocate of abstinence in 1847 Dickens answered:
"I have no doubt whatever that the warm stuff in the jug at Bob Cratchit's Christmas dinner, had a very pleasant effect on the simple party. I am certain that if I had been at Mr. Fezziwig's ball, I should have taken a little negus -- and possibly not a little beer -- and been none the worse for it, in heart or head. I am very sure that the working people of this country have not too many household enjoyments, and I could not, in my fancy or in actual deed, deprive them of this one when it is so innocently shared."
Dickens applied his unique power
of observation to the city in which he spent most of his life.  He
routinely walked the city streets, 10 or 20 miles at a time, and his
descriptions of nineteenth century London allow readers to experience
the sights, sounds, and smells of the old city. This ability to immerse
the reader into time and place sets the perfect stage for Dickens
to weave his fiction.Victorian London was the largest, most spectacular city in the world. While Britain was experiencing the Industrial Revolution, its capital was both reaping the benefits and suffering the consequences. In 1800 the population of London was around a million souls. That number would swell to 4.5 million by 1880. While fashionable areas like Regent and Oxford streets were growing in the west, new docks supporting the city's place as the world's trade center were being built in the east. Perhaps the biggest impact on the growth of London was the coming of the railroad in the 1830s which displaced thousands and accelerated the expansion of the city.
Imagine yourself in the London of the early 19th century. The homes of the upper and middle class exist in close proximity to areas of unbelievable poverty and filth. Rich and poor alike are thrown together in the crowded city streets. Street sweepers attempt to keep the streets clean of manure, the result of thousands of horse-drawn vehicles.  The
city's thousands of chimney pots are belching coal smoke, resulting
in soot which seems to settle everywhere. In many parts of the city
raw sewage flows in gutters that empty into the Thames. Street vendors
hawking their wares add to the cacophony of street noises. Pick-pockets,
prostitutes, drunks, beggars, and vagabonds of every description add
to the colorful multitude. Personal cleanliness is not a big priority, nor is clean laundry. In close, crowded rooms the smell of unwashed bodies is stifling. It is unbearably hot by the fire, numbingly cold away from it. At night the major streets are lit with feeble gas lamps. Side and secondary streets may not be lit at all and link bearers are hired to guide the traveler to his destination. Inside, a candle or oil lamp struggles against the darkness and blacken the ceilings. In Little Dorrit Dickens describes a London rain storm: In the country, the rain would have developed a thousand fresh scents, and every drop would have had its bright association with some beautiful form of growth or life. In the city, it developed only foul stale smells, and was a sickly, lukewarm, dirt- stained, wretched addition to the gutters. |
| Sanitation
and Disease Until the second half of the 19th century London residents were still drinking water from the very same portions of the Thames that the open sewers were discharging into.  Several
outbreaks of Cholera in the mid 19th century, along with The Great
Stink of 1858, when the stench of the Thames caused Parliament to
recess, brought a cry for action. The link between drinking water
tainted with sewage and the incidence of disease slowly dawned on
the Victorians. Dr
John Snow proved that all victims in a Soho area cholera outbreak
drew water from the same Broad
Street pump. Sir Joseph Bazalgette, chief engineer of the new Metropolitan Board of Works (1855), put into effect a plan, completed in 1875, which finally provided adequate sewers to serve the city. In addition, laws were put in effect which prevented companies supplying drinking water from drawing water from the most heavily tainted parts of the Thames and required them to provide some type of filtration. |
In the StreetsAfter the Stage Carriages Act of 1832 the hackney cab was gradually replaced by the omnibus as a means of moving about the city. By 1900 3000 horse-drawn buses were carrying 500 million passengers a year. A traffic count in Cheapside and London Bridge in 1850 showed a thousand vehicles an hour passing through these areas during the day. All of this added up to an incredible amount of manure which had to be removed from the streets. In wet weather straw was scattered in walkways, storefronts, and in carriages to try to soak up the mud and wet. Cattle were driven through the streets until the mid 19th century. In an article for Household Words in March 1851 Dickens, with characteristic sarcasm, describes the environmental impact of having live cattle markets and slaughterhouses in the city:
In Oliver Twist, Dickens describes the scene as Oliver and Bill Sikes travel through the Smithfield live-cattle market on their way to burglarize the Maylie home: It was market-morning. The ground was covered, nearly ankle-deep, with filth and mire; a thick steam, perpetually rising from the reeking bodies of the cattle, and mingling with the fog, which seemed to rest upon the chimney-tops, hung heavily above. All the pens in the centre of the large area, and as many temporary pens as could be crowded into the vacant space, were filled with sheep; tied up to posts by the gutter side were long 
lines of beasts and oxen, three or four deep. Countrymen, butchers,
drovers, hawkers, boys, thieves, idlers, and vagabonds of every low
grade, were mingled together in a mass; the whistling of drovers,
the barking dogs, the bellowing and plunging of the oxen, the bleating
of sheep, the grunting and squeaking of pigs, the cries of hawkers,
the shouts, oaths, and quarrelling on all sides; the ringing of bells
and roar of voices, that issued from every public-house; the crowding,
pushing, driving, beating, whooping and yelling; the hideous and discordant
dim that resounded from every corner of the market; and the unwashed,
unshaven, squalid, and dirty figures constantly running to and fro,
and bursting in and out of the throng; rendered it a stunning and
bewildering scene, which quite confounded the senses. The Smithfield live-cattle market was finally moved out of the city to slaughterhouses in Islington in 1855. |
The LawThe Metropolitan Police, London's first police force, was created by Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel (hence the name Peelers and, eventually, Bobbies) in 1829 with headquarters in what would become known as Scotland Yard. The old London watch system, in effect since Elizabethan times, was eventually abolished. |
| The Poor The Victorian answer to dealing with the poor and indigent was the New Poor Law, enacted in 1834. Previously it had been the burden of the parishes to take care of the poor. 
The new law required parishes to band together and create regional
workhouses where aid could be applied for. The workhouse was little
more than a prison for the poor. Civil liberties were denied, families
were separated, and human dignity was destroyed. The true poor often
went to great lengths to avoid this relief. Dickens, because of the childhood trauma caused by his father's imprisonment for debt and his consignment to the blacking factory to help support his family, was a true champion to the poor. He repeatedly pointed out the atrocities of the system through his novels. Journalist Henry Mayhew chronicled the plight of the London poor in articles originally written for the Morning Chronicle and later collected in London Labour and London Poor (1851). With the turn of the century and Queen Victoria's death in 1901 the Victorian period came to a close. Many of the ills of the 19th century were remedied through education, technology and social reform... and by the social consciousness raised by the immensely popular novels of Dickens. |
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Ever wonder why the subjects of all those portraits taken in the early days of photography sport such grim expressions? It had more to do with the limits of the technology than of the somber nature of the subject. Smiles are more spontaneous, and harder to hold naturally for the long exposure times required by the photographic equipment of the day. |
The Great Stink
by Clare Clark
A novel of corruption and murder beneath the streets of Victorian London
The Great Stink of London
by Stephen Halliday, Adam Hart-Davis (2001) Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis.
London - The Biography
by Peter Ackroyd (2001)
Huge, enthralling "biography" of the city of London from pre-history through today.
The City of Dickens
by Alexander Welsh (1999)
19th century London, so well described in Dickens as to be a character in the novels, is explored.
London
by Edward Rutherfurd (1997)
Historical novel of London from Roman times to the present.
