When you join Richard Jones for one of his Dickens London walks, you are joining someone who really knows the subject and who has the ability to bring the Streets of Dickens London vividly to life.Richard is the author of the classic Dickensian guide Walking Dickensian London.
Walks through all parts of London are featured in this book and it really is an eyeopener to the streets, places and people that Dickens would have known.
One of Richard’s more intriguing Dickens London Walking Tours is the area that covers Trafalgar Square. This gives Richard the opportunity to introduce a little biography on Charles Dickens and also to quote one of Dickens’s great comic passages.
In 1834 Dickens was working as a Parliamentary reporter for the Morning Chronicle, whose offices were at 332 Strand. As well as reporting on the various debates in Parliament he also began writing a series of essays or sketches about London Life.
His favourite book as a child had been Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, and he had even nicknamed youngest brother, Augustus, Moses after Moses Primrose, the vicars son in the book.
However, Augustus Couldn’t pronounce Moses so he repeated it as “Boses”.Delighted by this childish mispronunciation the family shortened this to Boz, which was the name Dickens adopted for his essays and they appeared as Sketches by Boz.
the Sketches Dickens to the attention of the publishers Chapman and Hall who in 1835 had been approached by the artist Robert Seymour to publish a series of his cartoons showing the mishaps of a group of sporting gentlemen whom he had named the Nimrod Club.
Mr Hall objected because, as he pointed out, although he had been raised in country he had no interest in sport. He suggested instead that the book be novel-like and that it be about a wide range of English scenes. He also suggested that the plates (drawings) should arise naturally out of the text.
Mr Hall approached Charles Dickens about writing the text and Dickens, who had recently been in Bath remembered a name he had seen there – Moses Pickwick - a coach proprietor. He thought this a perfect name and thus Pickwick Papers was born.
In his first sketch of Mr Pickwick Robert Seymour depicted him as a tall thin man. Again Mr Hall objected and suggested he make him more portly. Seymour did and thus the appearance of Pickwick that we all know today came in to being.
The publication suffered a major setback when, between the first and second numbers Seymour committed suicide in his garden shed at his house in Islington.
Chapman and Hall advertised for a new artist and among those who applied but was rejected was a young man by the name of William Makepeace Thackeray.
In the end the commission went to the artist Hablot Browne who adopted the Pseudonym Phiz to match Dickens’s Boz and remained his principle illustrator for the next 23 years.
The Pickwick Papers became a huge success and well and truly set the young writer on the road to literary fame and fortune.
We start our West End Dickens London walks at Charing Cross because it is where the Pickwickians began their adventures.
There is a building called Golden Cross House opposite Charing Cross Station which remembers the Golden Cross Inn, which was first mentioned in 1643. The one Dickens wrote of and knew was built in 1811 and was pulled down in 1827 to make way for Trafalgar Square.
Its location, as we explain on our Dickens London walk was more or less where Nelsons Column stands today.
Dickens has left us a picture of it in one of the Sketches By Boz entitled Early Coaches. Later it would be the place where David Copperfield spent his first night in London when newly arrived from Canterbury.
One of its main features was the danger to public safety from the low arch that led from the coach yard onto Strand. People travelling on top of a coach had to crouch to avoid banging their heads on this arch.
As the Pickwickians leave the yard en route to Rochester aboard the famous Coach The Commodore, Mr Jingle, reminds them of the arch in a memorable fashion:
Heads – Heads – take care of your heads – terrible place – dangerous work – other day – five children – mother – tall lady, eating sandwiches – forgot the arch – crash – knock – children look round – mother’s head off – sandwich in her hand – no mouth to put it in – head of a family off – shocking – shocking.
So when you are looking for Dickens London walks to take don’t stick to the familiar area around Holborn, consider a walking tour in an area that is not readily associated with Dickens.
