|
 |
Tours of London
DIRECTIONS
Continue under the bridges, go over the pedestrian crossing, bear left and go past Embankment Station to turn next right into Northumberland Avenue. Keep ahead over Embankment Place, veer right into Craven Street, and just after the stage door of the Playhouse Theatre, turn right into the unnamed alleyway, to pause by the barrier.
Charing Cross Station, which looms above you, stands on the site of Hungerford market, where Warren’s Blacking Factory was situated. It was in this rat-infested, ramshackle, wooden building, abutting the river Thames, that Dickens came to work at the age of 12, sticking labels onto pots of boot blacking. His workmates mockingly referred to him as the ‘Young Gentleman’, and the humiliation of his experience traumatized him, the shame remaining with him throughout his adult life. ‘Even now, famous and caressed and happy,’ he later said, ‘I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time of my life.’
The experience also affected his fiction. One of his work companions, for example, was an older boy named Bob Fagin, who was actually quite kind to the young Dickens, and certainly didn’t deserve being immortalized in Oliver Twist. Later, whilst writing his autobiography, Dickens found this part of his life too painful to recall. Instead he created a fictionalized character, reversed his own initials, and published his thinly disguised autobiography as David Copperfield.
DIRECTIONS
Backtrack and go right along Craven Street. Lined by dark-brick, 18th-century houses.
Number 40 was the home of Dr Charles West, founder of the Hospital for Sick Children.
Legend holds that it was a grotesque old door knocker on one of these houses that gave Dickens the idea for Scrooge’s knocker turning into Marley’s face in A Christmas Carol. Unfortunately, when an enthusiastic photographer approached the owner for permission to photograph the knocker, she is said to have removed it and placed it in a bank vault for safe keeping. Its whereabouts are now unknown.
DIRECTIONS
Continue to the top of Craven Street and go right along the Strand. Keep going, and on arrival at the pedestrian-crossing, turn right down the steps and into the uninspiring George Court.
Go right onto John Adam Street, and left into Buckingham Street, where a delightful combination of buildings of all ages and architectural styles greets you. Pause outside No 14 at the end on the right where a plaque remembers the residence here of the artists:-
William Etty (1787–1849) and Dickens’s friend Clarkson Stanfield (1793–1867). It was at a house opposite (now demolished) that Dickens lodged in about 1834 whilst working as a reporter at the House of Commons.DIRECTIONS
Go through the gates. Descend the steps and cross over to the:-
York Watergate, dating from 1626, and long since left landlocked by the construction of the Victoria Embankment beyond. Indeed, gazing from here over to the Thames, which is now some way off in the distance, you begin to get the measure of Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s achievement when you consider that, when Dickens lived in Buckingham Street, the river washed around the York Watergate.DIRECTIONS
Having paused to read its history displayed on a board, go left along the pathway, up the steps and turn left into York Buildings. Three quarters of the way along turn right into the delightfully gloomy Lower Robert Street, and descend into one of only a handful of the surviving 18th-century arches, built to support the buildings of the Adelphi – a prestigious housing development by the Adams Brothers.
Dickens loved to explore this labyrinth of subterranean vaults where, according to one account, ‘the most abandoned characters… often passed the night, nestling upon foul straw; and many a street thief escaped from his pursuers in these dismal haunts before the introduction of gaslight and a vigilant police.’ In David Copperfield, doubtlessly remembering his own boyhood, Dickens wrote, ‘I was fond of wandering about the Adelphi, because it was a mysterious place with those dark arches… ’.
|
|