Charles Dickens and London - walks and tours
DIRECTIONS
Exit Shadwell Station. Turn right onto Cable Street and just past the ornate library building dated 1860, go left through the gates. Keep walking ahead and proceed clockwise round the clearly visible:- St George’s Church. Nicholas Hawksmoor designed this massive edifice with its impressive 160-foot (48.8-metre) tower between 1714 and 1726. Sadly it sustained terrible bomb damage in World War II and only its outer walls survive as testimony to its former grandeur. In the 1850s the church’s rector and curate caused controversy by conducting their services according to ‘Romish’ practices. Dickens condemned this as ‘miserable trifling… fancy-dressing and pantomime posturing’. The locals were even more incensed and brought barking dogs to church, whilst the men refused to remove their hats, and smoked their pipes throughout the services! Having arrived at the west door of the church, you find a modern interior crouching within the older walls.
DIRECTIONS
With your back to this, exit through the gates opposite, turn left onto Cannon Street Road and left along: The Highway.In Dickens’s day this was known as Ratcliff Highway and it was renowned for its crime and prostitution. Nowadays, it is little more than a busy and ugly thoroughfare. It was to a long-vanished court just beyond St George’s Church that, shortly before his death, Dickens paid a visit to an opium den. Later, he sent John Jasper to the same neighbourhood in The Mystery of Edwin Drood. ‘Eastward and still eastward through the stale streets… until he reaches his destination, a miserable court, specially miserable among many such.’ His destination was the opium den where ‘in the meanest and closest of small rooms’ he lay upon a squalid broken-down bed and experienced opium-tainted visions.
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