Charles Dickens's London

A renowned Dickens scholar explores in depth what survives of Dickens's city, including detailed itineraries and unpublished photographs of Victorian London, and covering both "legal London" and the criminal underworld No novelist is as intimately connected to a great city as Dickens is to London. The vibrancy and variety of the city determined the shape and character of Dickens's work and he, in turn, recreated London in his fiction. Andrew Sanders retraces Dickens's footsteps through the streets, alleys, highways, and byways of the city, exploring the physical nature and architecture of Victorian London. He follows Dickens and his characters from the slums to the city, from the mansions of Mayfair to the respectable inner suburbs of Islington and Bloomsbury. He journeys from the untidiness of Walworth and Camden Town to the villas of Twickenham and Hampstead and semi-rural retreats of Dulwich, Finchley, and Highgate. Although vastly changed with time, the London that Dickens created is still vividly present in his writing. The first and greatest of urban novelists, Dickens captures the essence of the central modern social phenomenon—the excitements and problems of the city.