At the height of Dickens’ popularity, crowds would gather outside to wait for the latest episode. The offices of All The Year Round, one of the magazines Dickens founded to publish his stories, are on Wellington Street, just off the Strand. It is to close for much of 2012 as part of a 3.1 million redevelopment project, but is expected to reopen before Christmas. Opened in 1925, the museum holds the world’s most important collection of Dickens items, including his pens, letters, and furniture.

It was here that he wrote “Oliver Twist” and “Nicholas Nickleby.” The Charles Dickens Museum is housed in Dickens’ former family home, in Doughty Street.

Both the warehouse and the stairs, near what is now Embankment tube station, are long gone. “It was a crazy, tumbledown old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats… the dirt and decay of the place rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again,” he later told his biographer, John Forster. London was Dickens’ muse, helping to spark his creativity and provide ideas for some of the most memorable characters, settings and plot twists in English literature.Īs Britain – and literature lovers the world over – celebrates Dickens’ bicentenary in 2012, what better time to explore the city he knew and loved best?ĭickens moved to London as a child, but the family soon ran into financial trouble: His father was sent to debtors’ prison, and at the age of just 12, Dickens was forced to work in a shoe polish factory – Warren’s Blacking Warehouse, at Hungerford Stairs – to support his mother and siblings. “He called it his ‘magic lantern’, and would spend hours pacing the streets, drawing inspiration from what he saw around him.” “It triggered his imagination,” he told CNN. Charles Dickens, who was born 200 years ago this week, created some of the best-known and most loved figures in English literature, from Oliver Twist and David Copperfield to Pip, Miss Havisham and Magwitch.īut of all the characters he wrote about, none played as important a role in his work as that of London itself: its hustle and bustle, its glittering promise and grimy streets and the extremes of poverty and wealth experienced by those who lived there.Īlex Werner, the curator of the Museum of London’s “Dickens and London” exhibition, says the city was “absolutely central” to Dickens’ work.

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