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Peter Clark. Dickens's London

Peter Clark. Dickens's London. London: The Armchair Traveller, 2012. Pp. 130. $19.95. Daniel Tyler. A Guide to Dickens' London. London: Hesperus Press, 2012. Pp. 152. $19.95. We are more than 130 years on, now, in the history of guides to the London of Charles Dickens. In 1876, just six years after Dickens's death, T. Edgar Pemberton published his Dickens's London. Then, in 1879, Charles Dickens, Junior, published the first of four editions of his Dickens's Dictionary of London. In 1895 came a volume called Bozland by Percy Fitzgerald and in 1899 Robert Allbut's Rambles in Dickens' land. F. Hopkinson Smith's popular In Dickens' London first appeared in 1914. Recently, there have been many more Dickens guides, published in honor of or perhaps to take advantage of Dickens's two hundredth birthday. My first guide was that published by British Transport in 1970, a small paperback called The London of Charles Dickens; it was reprinted in 1979 by Peter Robinson. Later, I also used Geoffrey Fletcher's 1978 Pocket Guide for reference. I wish I had had as detailed and knowledgeable a guide as Peter Clark's Dickens's London when I was first exploring Dickens's world. And I am glad to have Daniel Tyler's A Guide to Dickens' London, not so much as a guide but as a first-rate work of scholarship and criticism. Clark's book leads its readers on a set of five London walks: from Trafalgar Square to Lincoln's Inn, from Lincoln's Inn to Mansion House, from Holborn to Soho Square, from Bermondsey to Holborn, and from the Bank back to Westminster. The final chapter follows Dickens through London's "First Suburbs": Camden Town, Chelsea, Greenwich, Hampstead, Highgate, and Limehouse. Some of the identifications are familiar enough, and easy enough for an amateur Dickensian to find; others are the gift of a professional Dickensian, working in a London that he obviously knows intimately. There are a few problems, however. In his introductory essay, Clark notes Dickens's introduction of "foreigners" into his London--"French, Spanish and Italian immigrants; and Jews" (the punctuation is Clark's); and then adds, "But they are socially outsiders. Today the social and racial mix in inner London would have been inconceivable in Dickens's time." This mangled sentence is followed by a bald assertion, "Dickens had very racist views"--and adds, as though to prove the point, "Rarely does anyone from outside Europe appear in his novels" (7). Identifying where St. James's Hall stood, Clark tells us, "It was here that Dickens used to give most of his London readings"--as though now he gives them elsewhere. And he adds, apparently in ignorance, "He was always an actor manque and he threw himself into dramatic readings" (63). Thackeray and Dickens somehow " both perchance bumped into each other" (16), and Dickens worked long days, "with breaks for lunch and an afternoon break for tea" (19). We know that Dickens sometimes had two dinner parties--or perhaps just a party for dinner and another for supper--but do we have any evidence of his taking multiple lunch breaks? Or is this a linguistic error? And in The Pickwick Papers, Alfred Snodgrass was actually named Augustus. The strengths of this little book are the Dickens details Clark gives us on the walks he maps out. Even the slightest deviations from those details, however, cause problems. And though he cites a few London streets with names from Dickens, Clark doesn't mention Darnay, Wrayburn, and Nickleby streets or Havisham House and Micawber House in Bermondsey; or Ebenezer and Micawber streets, Dingley Road and Oliver's Yard near the Barbican; or--spread throughout London--another dozen Dickens streets, lanes, roads, courts, drives, rises, estates, and squares. These are not really "Dickensian," of course, but they are fun to know or know about, as would have been the story of the ghost of Catherine Dickens haunting Tavistock House, the headquarters of the British Medical Association. …