Our repertoire of great London walks feature several that explore London’s literary heritage.
London boasts an extremely long and rich literary tradition.
Geoffrey Chaucer lived above Aldgate, in the easternmost part of The City until 1386, and playwright Joe Orton lived on Noel Road in Islington until his 1967 murder.
Marguerite Radclyffe Hall, author of the first lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness, lived in Chelsea and is buried in Highgate Cemetery, both of which our featured on our London walks in those areas.
Oscar Wilde, Dylan Thomas, Virginia Woolf, Fanny Burney, George Orwell, D. H. Lawrence, George Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling, George Eliot, Dorothy L. Sayers, William Blake—the list of authors who made London their home goes on and on.
Alas, a little blue plaque is usually all that’s left to mark the past, but there are some exceptions.
The wonderful Georgian town house where lexicographer Samuel Johnson lived and worked, compiling the world’s first English dictionary, is now a shrine called Dr. Johnson’s House, 17 Gough Sq., Fleet Street, EC4.
His original dictionary, on display, includes the definition “Dull: to make dictionaries is dull work.” There’s not much here in the way of furnishings, but the long upstairs room in which he worked has plenty of ambience.
Thomas Carlyle’s House, 24 Cheyne Row, SW3, is an 18th-century Queen Anne on a beautiful Chelsea back street.
The Scottish author/historian/philosopher lived here 47 years, until his death in 1881. His house remains virtually unaltered, to the extent that some of the rooms are without electric light. In this eerie atmosphere you can imagine yourself sitting in one of the writer’s original Victorian chairs or playing the same piano Chopin himself played.
Dickens’s House, 48 Doughty St., WC1, was home to one of London’s most famous novelists for a short but prolific period.
It was here where he worked on Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, and Oliver Twist. His letters, desk and chair, and first editions are on display, along with some memorabilia of his wife, Catherine.
If you are interested in DIY London walks you might like to purchase a copy of Richard Jones’s guide to Dickens London Walking Dickensian London that offers a choice of 25 walks around the London that Dickens knew and wrote about.
Tags: Charles Dickens, Chelsea, Dickens, Dickens House Museum, Dr Johnson, Geoffrey Chaucer, Islington, Joe Orton, Literary London, london, London walks, My walks of London, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Carlyle's House
