No writer is more associated with London than Charles Dickens. Although not born in London (he was born in Portsmouth on 7th February 1812), he spent his formative years in the capital and it was during those years that he began to forge a deep understanding of and affinity with the streets, buildings and people that surrounded him.
Dickens Loved doing his own London walks.
As a young boy he would walk all over London and absorb the atmosphere of many of the City’s contrasting quarters. These walks would later furnish him with a terrific knowledge of a City that he came to love and loathe in equal measure.
One of the most traumatic periods of his childhood began on his 12th birthday when his parents sent him to work at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse, which stood in Hungerford Market on the site now occupied by Charing Cross Railway Station.
The Real Life Counterpart of a Famous Dickens Character.
His job was to sit at a table and stick labels on to bottles of boot blacking. The sensitive young boy, who had genuinely believed he was destined to grown up to become a gentlemen found himself surrounded by the type of low class folk whom he later referred to as the “shabby genteel.”
Amongst the workers was an older boy by the name of Bob Fagin whose name Dickens - somewhat unfairly since Bob was very kind to the young Charles - later appropriated and used as the name as his arch-villain Fagin in Oliver Twist.
Dickens Father Arrested For Debt.
A short time after Charles began work at the Blacking warehouse his father, John, a man who could never control his spending, was arrested for debt and locked up in the Marshalsea Debtors Prison, one wall of which still survives on the left of Borough High Street to the south of the current London Bridge.
With the exception of Charles and his sister, the rest of the family moved in to the Marshalsea with John Dickens. Charles was found lodgings elsewhere and every morning he would visit his family at the prison, walk London on his way work, return to the prison at the end of his working day and then make his lonely way back to his lodgings.
Years later, when he had become a famous novelist he wrote an autobiographical piece about this period of his childhood and recalled how:-
“My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man and wander desolately back to that time.”
Of course what the young Charles could never have imagined was just how influential and inspiring this period of his life would prove. Left to his own devices he walked all over London and on these London walks he came to know the city intimately.
This period of his life may have haunted him to the end of his days but, had it not been for this trauma there’s a good chance that he would never have gained the knowledge and experience of the Victorian Metropolis to portray it so vividly in his books and sketches. Indeed, there is a good chance that, without the events of his early teens there may never have been a great and timeless novelist by the name of Charles Dickens.
