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Dickensian London

Written by Sevencam
Wednesday, 04 November 2009 00:00

Charles Dickens was the most popular English novelist of the Victorian era and remains one of Britain’s best-loved authors, whose novels and short stories have never gone out of print.

Over 180 film and TV adaptations have been based on his works, and for the first time ever this November, the London where Dickens lived, roamed the streets for inspiration, and based the majority of his novels, will be brought to 3D life in Disney’s A CHRISTMAS CAROL.

Dickens had a rags to riches story of his own, moving from home to home after his father was imprisoned for debt, and eventually becoming a successful author. He was a big supporter of London’s esteemed Great Ormond Street children’s hospital, having married and had ten children of his own. He was also an active supporter of social reform in Victorian England, including removing children from the workhouses and even visited the US to speak for the abolition of slavery. Upon his death aged 58, he was buried at the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey and was also commemorated on a £10 note issued by the Bank of England. Intriguingly, Dickens also had a keen interest in the paranormal and was an early member of the Ghost Club (a paranormal research organisation, founded in London in 1862).

His works

Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, arguably his most well-known novel, in 1843, the story of a miserly old man, Ebenezer Scrooge, who finally finds redemption after visitations from three different ghosts during one very long and scary Christmas Eve. Also famed for such works as Great Expectations, Bleak House, The Pickwick Papers and A Tale of Two Cities, his Dickensian characters with their whimsical names such as Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Bob Cratchit, Oliver Twist, The Artful Dodger, Fagin, Miss Havisham and David Copperfield are among the most memorable in English literature.

One of the ‘characters’ of Dickens’ books was London itself, with vivid descriptions of old coaching inns, the Thames, the City and the East End, peppered throughout his tomes. Dickens worked closely with the artists who illustrated his books, giving them an overall summary of the story at the outset, and approving the drawings upon completion, ensuring that his characters and settings were exactly how he envisioned them to be. Robert Zemeckis and his team of filmmakers studied these illustrations carefully and have breathed 3D life into the characters, costumes, and set design, to make A CHRISTMAS CAROL the closest re-imagining of Dickens’ original story ever created on film. The London of 1843, when the story is set, was a very different city back then...

Greater London had a population of just 2.2 million in 1841 (compared with 7 today) and day-to-day life was very hard for the majority of the city’s inhabitants. Life expectancy for the average Londoner was just 37 in Dickens’  day and many things we now take for granted, like clean water, were a rarity. London’s air was also very polluted and all but the newest buildings were black with soot. Streets were awash in mud and raw sewage and pedestrians had to be on the lookout for pickpockets who made their living preying on the unsuspecting.

“If a present-day Londoner could step back in time to Victorian London,” says Dr. Florian Schweizer of London’s Dickens Museum, “they would experience an assault on their senses. London was noisy, smelly and dark, and there was extreme squalor and poverty in areas that are now London’s most fashionable districts.” What else was different about London in the middle of the 19^th century? Here’s a guide to what life was like for rich and poor in what was then the biggest, busiest and fastest-growing city in the world…

Under Construction

To a visitor from the small town or countryside, Dickens’ London would have seemed like one big building site. The City of London was evolving from a residential area to a banking and finance centre, with its former residents moving to the suburbs and commuting to the City, as mass transportation was introduced. (Scrooge’s business is based in the City and his clerk, Bob Cratchit lives in Camden Town).  Paddington train station had already been constructed but there was no underground rail system, or ‘Tube’ and the prominent stations Waterloo and King’s Cross had not yet been built.

Buckingham Palace and Trafalgar Square  were already in existence, and Nelson’s Column was erected the same year as A Christmas Carol was published, but the four bronze lions of Trafalgar Square were yet to be sculpted, as was Piccadilly’s ‘Eros’ statue. The Royal Albert Hall didn’t exist (it was built to honour Queen Victoria’s beloved husband, Prince Albert’s vision of a centre for Art and Sciences after his death, with the proceeds of the Crystal Palace Great Exhibition he organised in 1851) and neither did Tower Bridge.

The Big Ben clock tower was under construction as were the Houses of Parliament, the original buildings having been destroyed by fire in 1934.

Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks, still one of London’s most popular tourist attractions, opened in 1835 at its present location in Baker Street. Dickens lived just a short walk away and was a frequent visitor.

Street lights

In Dickens’  time London streets were lit by gas lamps and hundreds of lamplighters crossed the city to illuminate them as darkness fell.

Getting around

There were no cars in Dickens’ time and for the rich the quickest way of getting around was by horse and carriage. There were probably close to 250,000 working horses in the city by mid century. London’s famous Underground railway had a modest beginning in 1863 with the opening of a four-mile line that ran from Paddington to Farringdon Street. The trains that ran on the line were all steam-operated.

Off to work

Rich Victorians relied on maids, butlers, nannies, gardeners and cooks to tend to their every need and there were 120,000 household servants in London during Dickens’  time. Men working in the city’s workshops and factories laboured in dirty and often dangerous conditions and sometimes worked for more than twelve hours at a stretch. Children as young as five were also part of the London workforce, sweeping chimneys, running errands, cleaning the city streets, polishing shoes, and selling matches or flowers. Dickens himself worked in a blacking factory by the time he was twelve while the rest of his family was in debtors’ prison.

Going to school

It wasn’t until 1870 that it became compulsory for children between the ages of five and twelve to go to school. Slates were used instead of pen and paper and lessons mainly focussed on the essentials of reading, writing and arithmetic. Teachers could punish children who weren’t doing well at their lessons by forcing them to wear a dunce’s cap in class and caning was also common. On the plus side, there were always the school holidays to look forward to. Children had a two-week break for Christmas, a week at Easter and three- to four-week break in July and August.

The law

London’s Metropolitan Police first took to the streets in 1829. Its 3,000 members were required to wear a blue uniform and top hat at all times (even off-duty).

Public hangings were still common in Dickens’ day and the author himself was present at a hanging at a London jail in 1849. He later wrote several letters to The Times urging the abolition of such public spectacles.

Food

At the time Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, restaurants were still a rarity in London and were only available to the rich. The less well-off cooked their meals at home over an open hearth. The “range” –  a Victorian ancestor of the modern cooker – was only invented in the 1840s and remained a luxury item for years to come. The poorest Londoners often lived in houses with no cooking facilities at all and had to buy their meals from the shops and stalls that lined the streets. Some of the traders mixed sawdust, ashes, chalk or even powdered bones into the food they sold.

Drink

Milk was a rare treat for most Londoners because there was no way to keep it fresh and, until the development of the railways, no way to get it to the city on a daily basis. Even tea was expensive since it was heavily taxed. It’s no surprise then that many nineteenth century Londoners resorted to alcohol. Gin and beer were very cheap and it’s been calculated that there was a pub or shop selling alcohol every hundred yards on the average London street.

Having fun

Without computers, phones, or televisions, the Victorians had to make their own entertainment. Card games like whist and bridge were popular, as was chess and backgammon and parlour games like Charades and Blindman’s Buff. Children played with marbles, spinning tops, hoops or dolls. Reading was also popular and Dickens wrote some of the biggest best-sellers of his day.

What to wear

By the 1840s men had abandoned the flamboyant fashions of the previous generation and generally wore dark-coloured clothing, in part because of the London soot. The rich had their clothes made by tailors or seamstresses. Everyone else bought their clothes from second-hand shops. The first ready-made suit didn’t become available until the mid 1850s.

Want to know more?

The best source of information about life in Dickens’ London is the work of the man himself. On many days the author would take a ten- or even twenty-mile walk through the city’s streets and later record the sights and sounds he had experienced in his books. And if you wonder what Dickens would make of present-day London, Dickens expert Dr. Florian Schweizer says he would probably feel surprisingly at home. “Dickens would undoubtedly still recognise much of ‘his’ London. Doughty Street where Dickens lived from 1837 to 1839 in what is now the Charles Dickens Museum http://www.dickensmuseum.com/ is a well-preserved street that has hardly changed at all. I think the high-rise buildings in the City of London and the Docklands, Tower Bridge and the London Eye would startle him, but undoubtedly he would use the new scenery as a backdrop for his fiction.”

First edition copies of A Christmas Carol, with John Leech’s original illustrations, in exceptional condition, are estimated to be worth between $30,000 to $50,000 in value. But to see Dickens' vision in 3D for a fraction of that price, visit your local cinema from the 4^th of November to embark on the thrilling ghostly ride across London that is A CHRISTMAS CAROL!