|
 |
A Covent Garden Walk with Dickens.
DIRECTIONS
Follow Lower Robert Street as it veers right. Go left through the gates at the end, ascend the seemingly endless stairs and keep ahead along Adelphi Terrace, bearing left along Adam Street. Continue on to the Strand. Cross to its opposite side and pause outside the:-
Adelphi Theatre, twice rebuilt since the mid 19th-century, when popular, although piratical, dramatizations of Dickens’s novels were staged here. Much to the author’s consternation these plays were often put on long before the novels in question had been completed and often anticipated his endings!DIRECTIONS
Facing the Adelphi, go left and turn into Exchange Court – the second alley on the right. Walk its splendidly atmospheric length and turn right onto Maiden Lane. A little way along on the right, a battered Royal coat of arms stands over the stage door of the Adelphi Theatre.
Continue, pausing on the left where the road widens to admire the magnificent frontage of Rules, which is reputedly the oldest restaurant in London.
Founded in 1798 by Thomas Rule, its interior is still furnished in grand Victorian style, with 19th-century prints and paintings on the walls and dark wood tables and chairs. Dickens used to dine here regularly and a special table was reserved for him in an alcove towards the back of the first floor. This is now a private dining room. Its walls are adorned with prints and a playbill for a performance that Dickens performed in, which he presented to the restaurant himself. Thackeray was also a regular, and, later, so too were the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) and his mistress Lillie Langtry, whose private dining room was once the most celebrated ‘Table For Two’ in London.DIRECTIONS
Continue to the end of Maiden Lane. Go left into Southampton Street and keep ahead to proceed clockwise around the:-
Piazza of Covent Garden Market, site of the famous flower, fruit and vegetable market from 1656 to 1974. It was a vivid description of the market in George Colman’s Broad Grins that caused the young Dickens to venture here in 1822 to experience for himself ‘the flavour of the faded cabbage-leaves as if it were the very breath of comic fiction’. In adulthood he mentioned the market many times in his novels.DIRECTIONS
Keep going clockwise, passing on the left the portico of St Paul’s church, dating from the 17th century, and where the opening of Shaw’s Pygmalion (1913) was set.
Take the next left into King Street and pause on the right outside No 35, where the:-
Garrick Club was founded in 1831 as ‘a society in which actors and men of education and refinement might meet on equal terms’. Dickens was elected to the club in 1837 and retained his membership until 1865.
Thackeray was also a member. One evening in May 1858, he was passing a group of members who were idly gossiping on the steps of the building. The subject of their conversation was Charles Dickens, who had formally and publicly separated from his wife. Rumour had it that the split was due to Dickens having an affair with his wife’s younger sister, Georgina Hogarth, who had braved her family’s displeasure and become her brother-in-law’s housekeeper. To the Victorian mind, such a relationship was tantamount to incest, and it was this scandal that the group were discussing as Thackeray entered the club. ‘No such thing,’ he cried, ‘it’s with an actress.’ When word reached Dickens of Thackeray’s outburst, he sent him an angry denial. But Thackeray remained unconvinced, believing Dickens to be ‘half mad about his domestic affairs’. It was later that year that the animosity between them erupted into the so-called ‘Garrick Club Affair’ (see page 127–8), which led to Dickens’s resignation from the committee. The club eventually outgrew the intimacy of this first home and, in 1864, moved to its current location on nearby Garrick Street.
DIRECTIONS
Backtrack into Covent Garden Market; turn first left along James Street, right into Floral Street and right again onto Bow Street.
Walk past the Royal Opera House, the current building dating from 1858 and which has recently undergone a costly state-of-the-art refurbishment programme. In the 19th century, it was known as the Covent Garden Theatre and it was to its stage manager, George Bartley, that Dickens wrote requesting an audition whilst working at Doctors’ Commons (see page 152). From 1837 to 1839 the manager here was Dickens’s great friend, the actor William Macready.DIRECTIONS
Continue along Bow Street.
It was on the right before Russell Street that the old Bow Street Police Court was situated, and where the Artful Dodger appeared charged with theft in Oliver Twist. In 1879, the court moved across the road to its current location, opposite the Royal Opera House.DIRECTIONS
Keep ahead into Wellington Street. Cross to the left side, and pause at the junction with Tavistock Street where a blue plaque states that:-
‘this building housed the offices of Charles Dickens’s Magazine All the Year Round and his private apartments from 1859 to 1870.’ The magazine was a weekly publication and included serial fiction, essays, poetry and topical journalism. In its first 27 months the magazine serialized A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, as well as Wilkie Collins’s The Woman In White (1860), and became so successful that crowds would often gather in the street to await the next issue. It was also from here that his Uncommercial Traveller set out on his exploratory perambulations around London, the results of which were published in the journal between 1860 and 1869.DIRECTIONS
Continue along Wellington Street and pause at the junction with Exeter Street to look across at the elegant cream portico of the:-
Lyceum Theatre. It was here that a stage adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities was performed with Dickens overseeing rehearsals and, possibly, even directing the play. The novel’s famed last words, ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far better rest that I go to than I have ever known’ were changed to the more succinct and melodramatic, ‘Farewell Lucy, Farewell Life!’ Curtain. Ellen Ternan also performed here several times in 1859. In 1863, Dickens’s friend, the actor Charles Fechter (1824–79), became the manager of the Lyceum and celebrated by giving Dickens the Swiss Chalet that became the author’s summer study for the remainder of his life (see pages 187 & 199). The offices of Household Words, a weekly journal that Dickens edited between 1850 and 1859, used to stand opposite the theatre on Wellington Street.DIRECTIONS
Turn left into Exeter Street, left into Catherine Street and continue to the top. On the right is the magnificent frontage of the:- Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, rebuilt in 1812 and managed between 1841–43 by William Macready who, although making a huge financial loss, added to the theatre’s prestige. DIRECTIONS
Go right along Russell Street, left into Drury Lane and a little way along on the left step through the gates to enter :-
Drury Lane Gardens. This was formerly the burial ground for the church of St Martin’s-in-the-Fields (the buildings on either side of the entrance were a mortuary and the keeper’s lodge). By the 19th century it had become horribly overcrowded. Dickens used it in Bleak House as the original of Jo’s Churchyard, where Captain Hawdon (Lady Dedlock’s lover and Esther Summerson’s father) was buried. It is described as ‘a hemmed-in churchyard, pestiferous and obscene, whence malignant diseases are communicated to the bodies of our dear brothers and sisters who have not departed… ’. It was on the steps of this churchyard that Esther found the dead body of Lady Dedlock.DIRECTIONS
Exit Drury Lane Gardens. Go left along Drury Lane, and turn right at the traffic lights into Great Queen Street. Keep going straight ahead past the huge entrance of the Freemason’s Hall, which dominates the right side of the street, and pause outside the New Connaught Rooms on the right.
These incorporate the surviving rooms of the Freemason’s Tavern where a lavish farewell banquet was given prior to Dickens’s departure on his last visit to America in 1867.DIRECTIONS
Continue to the traffic lights. Cross over Kingsway, bear left and keep going straight ahead to arrive at Holborn Underground Station where this tour ends.
Stroll back to London walks
|
|