This post has been contributed by Amanda Harvey Purse.

When we think of ‘Dickens’s London’, we may not instantly think of the borough of Southwark. This district however, packed a powerful punch for him, so much so that it played a vital role in Charles’s own life and in his stories.

At the age of twelve, young Master Dickens was moved out of his family home at Gower Street. This was not a house that the family had known well. They had lived there for only a matter of months before John Dickens, who was heavily in debt to a Mr. James Kerr, a baker, was sent to the Marshalsea Debtors Prison on the 20^th of February 1824. Charles’s mother Elizabeth had tried to run a school from their house at Gower Street to help with the family funds, but this sadly failed. Ultimately, most of the Dickens family followed John Dickens to the debtors’ prison, which was situated along what is now Borough High Street, in Southwark. Charles, however, was sent to work at Warren’s Blacking, 30 Hungerford Stairs. He had to work ten hours a day there, wrapping labels around bottles of shoe polish, for a wage of six shillings a week, which paid for his own lodgings in an attic room in Lant Street, Southwark. This placed him very near his family in the Marshalsea, as he was only slightly to the west of Borough High Street. He was so close, in fact, that he often had breakfast and supper with his family.

We can see the stark effect of the prison on Charles through the vital role it plays in novels such as The Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield. This effect appears most significantly in Little Dorrit, in which the main character, Amy, is born inside the Marshalsea Prison. Although John Dickens would only spend three months within the prison, Charles’s mother forced Charles to carry on working at Warren’s for months afterwards, due to it being owned by a relation of hers. This was something Charles would never forgive his mother for.

Walking from his lodging in Lant Street to the Blacking Factory where he worked, Dickens would have passed by Blackfriars Road and Blackfriars Bridge in Southwark. He would later write:

‘My usual way home was over Blackfriars Bridge and down that turning in Blackfriars Road (Union Street) which has Rowland Hill’s chapel on one side and the likeness of a golden dog licking a golden pot over a shop door on the other’

Forster, Life of Charles Dickens, Ch. 2, p. 61.

Sadly the chapel is no longer there. The sign of the Dog and Pot public house which Dickens describes was held within the Cuming Museum, which suffered from a fire in 2013. There are hopes that this Museum will reopen later on in 2019. This wasn’t the only time when Dickens recalled his time living within Lant Street in Southwark. In The Pickwick Papers, Dickens writes:

‘There is a repose about Lant Street in the Borough which sheds a gentle melancholy upon the soul. There are also a good many houses to let in this street, it is a bye street too, and its dullness is soothing.’

Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, p.375.

The spirit of Dickens is still very much apart of Lant Street today. A school that is along this road, originally built for the London School Board in 1877, is now called the Charles Dickens Primary School. Also within the same area are streets named Dorrit Street, Copperfield Street, Pickwick Street and two parks called Little Dorrit Park and Dickens Fields.

In another of Charles Dickens’s works, David Copperfield, the author again sets a scene in Southwark, near the Elephant and Castle. The main character decides to leave his lodgings in London to visit his Aunt Betsy Trotwood at Dover. In his search for someone to carry his trunk to the coach office, he finds

‘…a long legged young man with a very little empty donkey-cart standing near the obelisk in Blackfriars Road’

Dickens, David Copperfield, p. 154.

However, the young man David Copperfield has chosen to help him, isn’t very helpful at all, for the young man runs off with David’s trunk and even takes his last half-guinea. The main character chases the thief:

‘I came to a stop in the Kent Road, at a terrace with a piece of water before it and a great foolish image in the middle blowing a dry shell. Here I sat down on a door step, quite spent with the efforts I had already made and with hardly breath enough to cry for the loss of my box and half-Guinea.’

Dickens, David Copperfield, p. 156.

Dickens had not solely used his imagination to set the scene, as the terrace described refers to Webb’s County Terrace. The water and the image on the building disappeared in the 1880s.

At the northern tip of the borough of Southwark, is London Bridge. This bridge had important roles to play within Dickens’s stories too. In fact, it could be said to have been the starting point for many of his best loved protagonists, such as Little Dorrit and Barnaby Rudge. In Great Expectations, Pip crosses this bridge when he is in despair after hearing of Estella’s forthcoming marriage, and David Copperfield visits it to watch the world go by. One can imagine that perhaps Charles did just that, on more than one occasion in his life. However, perhaps London Bridge’s most famous claim to fame within a Dickens story, is the part it played in the most brutal scenes Charles was to ever write, the killing of Nancy in Oliver Twist. Nancy meets with Mr. Brownlow on the steps that lead down from London Bridge, to try to save Oliver. But she is overheard in her task, leading to her murder at the hands her partner, Bill Sikes.   

Charles Dickens wrote of the city in remarkable detail. Although he mainly wrote fiction, he does something special in adding elements of truth in describing areas of London at a time which seems so very different to us now. He captures a part of London’s history for us and all readers have to do, to time-travel back to Victorian London, is to open one of his many great books.

Works Cited

• “About the Cuming Museum.” Southwark Council. https://www.southwark.gov.uk/events-culture-and-heritage/heritage-and-local-history/cuming-museum/about-the-cuming-museum
• Dickens, Charles. The Pickwick Papers. 1837. London and New York: Penguin Popular Classics, 1994.
• Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield. 1850. London and New York: Penguin Popular Classics, 1994.
• Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. London: Chapman and Hall, 1876.

Amanda Harvey Purse is an historical researcher for London-based museums such as the City of London Police Museum and certain television programmes on the subject of Victorian and Tudor history and has studied The Tudors at the University of Roehampton. She is the author of Jack and Old Jewry: The City of London Policemen who Hunted the Ripper, and Inspector Reid: The Real Ripper Street, which won 2018 Non Fiction Book Reviews and More Book Award, and The Cutbush Connections: In Flowers, In Blood and in the Ripper Case, and her latest book, Martha.

Amanda has written articles for The Whitechapel Society Journal, The Ripperologist Magazine and The True Crime Dagger Magazine as well as other websites. She is a member of the Historical Metropolitan Police Society and a newly elected member of the Royal Historical Society.