When you join Richard Jones on one of his Charles Dickens London walks you are joining the man who wrote the book Walking Dickensian London.
One of the addresses that is covered on this walking tour of Dickens London is 58 Lincoln’s Inn Fields which was, from 1834 to 1856, the home of John Forster (1812–76).
Forster was Dickens’s greatest friend and his first significant biographer. Dickens based Mr Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend (1864–65) on Forster, and later used his house for the residence of Mr Tulkinghorn – legal adviser to Sir Leicester Dedlock and evil blackmailer of Lady Dedlock – in Bleak House.
Dickens was at his lawyer-bashing best when he wrote:
‘The crow flies straight across Chancery Lane… into Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Here, in a large house, formerly a house of state, lives Mr Tulkinghorn. It is let off in sets of chambers now, and in these shrunken fragments of its greatness lawyers lie in maggots in nuts.’
On the 2nd December, 1844 Dickens, who had travelled especially from Italy for the occasion, gave a private reading at Forster’s house from his new Christmas story ‘The Chimes’. The select gathering included Forster, Thomas Carlyle, and Daniel Maclise.
‘There was not a dry eye in the house’, wrote Daniel Maclise to Catherine Dickens, who had remained in Italy. ‘Shrieks of laughter – there were indeed – and floods of tears as a relief to them – I do not think that there ever was such a triumphant hour for Charles… ’
Maclise also did a pencil sketch of the occasion (opposite), showing Dickens seated at the desk, the book open in front of him, surrounded by his enraptured audience.
Forster considered it an accurate depiction of the event, although he did comment that there was a touch of caricature of which he considered himself ‘chief victim.’
A second reading two evenings later was equally successful, and thus were sown the seeds of Dickens forays into amateur theatricals and, according to Forster, ‘those readings to larger audiences by which, as much by his books, the world knew him in later life.’
This is just one location that features on Richard’s Dickens London walks but it really is a Dickensian landmark and a true time capsule of Victorian London.
