It was right at Georges and Vulture is Mr. pickwick and his cockney servant, St. Weller, stayed pending the outcome of the sensational trial for breaking a promise of marriage brought by Pickwick's querulous landlady, Mrs Martha Bardell. And it was right here in a first floor room with chinz curtains that Mr. Pickwick received the summons. Dickens not only created Pickwick but also created London: “A London there was no fog until Dickens invented it."
When in London one goes in search of the places loved by Dickens, one immediately thinks of his characters, the greengrocers, the innkeepers, the street vendors of the alley Petticoat, market porters and wig-wearing lawyers.
Despite the destruction and reconstruction of many corners of London, there are still several corners that he described, then with a little 'imagination you can also find that nothing has changed.
It is on the bank of the Thames that Nancy, one of Dickens' truest and most pathetic villains secretly met with Brownlow and Rose Mayle to help them understand the mystery surrounding the birth of the foundling Oliver Twist. For Dickens the Thames symbolized the ever changing fate of his characters. In the David copperfield, one of its tragic but redeemed heroines Artha laments: “Oh, the river! I know it's like me! I know I belong to him. I know he's the natural mate for guys like me! Where at the beginning it had nothing wrong with it, and then it winds its way through the squalid streets, soiled and saddened and goes away, like my life, towards a great sea that is always in a storm!”.
If you want to get to lantstreet, we find where in 1824 Dickens as a child lived alone with his father, a model of the eternal penniless Micawber who was in debt prison. It could have been John Dickens himself who announced the theorem that his son put Micawber in the mouth: "Income £20 a year, outgoings £19 sixpence a year, equal happiness; income £20 a year, outlays £20 a year, zero shillings and sixpence, equal misery.”
David Copperfield was Charles Dickens. The forlorn boy of the novel worked in a rat-infested warehouse, bottling wine. The boy worked nearby, in a shoe polish factory. David labeled the wines, and Charles the tins of polish, for six shillings a week.
In Dickens' teenage years the place where it is now Trafalgar Square was a cluster of buildings, among which stood a popular inn, the Golden Cross, where the writer lodges David Copperfield and his schoolmates, and where the famous swindler Alfred Jingles, who is perhaps the nicest ruffian in all English literature, had his first meeting with Mr. Pickwick. Beyond an alley, facing the Golden Cross stood the beauty Church di St. Martin in the Fields. And it was here that Copperfield found the weary and despondent Mr. Peggotty, almost at the end of the long search for Emiliuccia, his beloved granddaughter.
Dickens' characters could be seen right in the squares and alleys of this neighborhood. The brilliant drunk lawyer Sydney Cardboard, in the novel The two cities drove his double Charles Darney. Not far away, on the top floor of the last house in Garden Court, near the river, lived Pip delle Big hopes.
North of Fleet Street there is Lincoln's Inn, which can also be accessed through the Tudor-style entrance which opens onto Vicolo della Cancelleria, where the Esther Summersonin Bleak House. On winter afternoons, the scene is as it should have been for Dickens. Dickens' fog symbolized the slowness of the law and suffocated as he commented G.K.Chesterton on the High Court of the Chancery and all those poor souls who stumbled in his path.
Although Dickens was born in Portsmouth on the south coast of England he died in Kent, in his house called Gad's Hill Place, he spent most of his life in London, in 32 different houses. Dickens arrived in London under the name of Boz, the pseudonym he had adopted to write his lucky him Sketches.
A Furnival's Inn led, in 1836, his beautiful wife Catherine Hogarth, whom he married while getting his first writing contract. The publisher had commissioned him to write stories on a monthly basis to accompany cartoons by a famous cartoonist. But with his impudence he went further than he managed to change the publisher's idea and delivered the first installment of his Pickwick Circle.
After the birth of the first of their ten children, the Dickens, along with Catherine's sister Mary, moved into a 12-room house at 48 Doughty Street in Bloombury. But here a tragedy occurred, in May 1837 Mary collapsed in the arms of Dickens. Her death inspired the death of Nellina in the novel The antiques shop.
Opposite Furnival's Inn is the Staple Inn, an inn dating back six centuries, whose timber walls were described by Dickens in his last book, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. A little further west, the inn Gray's Inn, where Copperfield went to live when he came to visit his newfound schoolmate Tommy Traddles, who became a lawyer and owner of his own office in that building.
The famous school for pickpockets in Fagin it was located in a noisy alley near Holborn: Saffron Hill. Holborn, like Fleet Street, leads to the City, the financial center of London. It is in this place that Dickens evokes a sweet atmosphere, that in the Christmas song when Scrooge, transformed by the atmosphere diffused by Christmas, bought a large notebook for his poor employee, Bob cratchit.
Dickens once said: "I think I know this great city quite well.” In his incessant wanderings he sometimes went as far as lime house, a neighborhood of sailors and merchants where the docks buzzed with activity and where the riverbank was lit by tavern-lamps. But from year to year the English capital changes, and it is surprising that so many memories survive in it that always bring us back to Dickens.
