A Dickens Day

Off on the Underground to Borough Underground Station where we met Richard Jones, our guide for the London of Dickens and Shakespeare walk (www.londonwalking.co.uk). Richard had a lively and engaging style which really brought to life the sites we visited which were of importance in the lives of Dickens and Shakespeare.

We started with the church of St George the Martyr, where the Dickens' character Little Dorrit was baptised and married and, continuing that theme, moved on to the only remaining wall of the old Marshalsea Prison, where she lived with her father who was in the debtors' prison.

Richard led us to sunny little Redcross Garden, hidden behind houses and a railway line, where there were several quaint houses that were established as 'assisted housing' in 1887 by Octavia Hill, who had been inspired by Dickens' work in assisting poor young women to escape their poverty.

Further on we stopped at the Cross Bones Graveyard where medieval prostitutes were buried in unconsecrated ground and which in the eighteenth century became a church graveyard before becoming derelict. There are now memorial ribbons on the fence commemorating those earlier burials.

Other places we visited were the George Inn (London's only surviving coaching inn, which was frequented by Dickens), White Hart Yard (the site of White Hart Inn which was immortalised in 'Pickwick Papers' and had a Shakespearean connection) and the site of the Rose Theatre (a competitor to Shakespeare's Globe Theatre).

After the walk, Ian and I returned to the Borough Market, a specialty food market in a Victorian market hall, and enjoyed a couple of delicious chocolate eclairs before taking the Underground north under the Thames to the Charles Dickens Museum in Doughty Street, Bloomsbury. This was a Georgian terrace house where Dickens and his family lived from 1837 to 1839, where two of his daughters were born and where he wrote 'Oliver Twist' and 'Nicholas Nickleby'. It was beautifully presented with a display of original documents and letters, paintings, photographs, furniture and memorabilia.

A copy of one of his books which Dickens has annotated
for a dramatic presentation

We walked back through Bloomsbury to our apartment and, after a short rest, had dinner at 'The Cambridge' pub not far away in Charing Cross Road.

Bloomsbury streetscape

St George's Bloomsbury -
'the most eccentric spire in London'

In homage to the 'London Review of Books'
- to which Ian has subscribed for many years!

Festive street in Bloomsbury

The Cambridge pub, Charing Cross Road