The Worshipful Company of Tax Advisers

A Virtual Walk of London – Charles Dickens Lost and Found

A rather dingy evening in March (for most parts of the country) found us warm inside enjoying a ‘walk’ round London with the comfort of an armchair and a cup of tea to hand.

 

Richard Burnip treated us to an enthralling hour.  Richard is an actor and lecturer and dropped in to the talk a couple of works relevant to his talk on which he’d done the talking book J  His soft advertising worked, as I’ve just ordered Gaol: the story of Newgate (Kelly Grovier).

 

The virtual walk concentrated  on the western side of the City of London and round the Inns of Court.  As most will know, fact very much intermingles with fiction as there were no streets, buildings or obscure nooks of this area which Dickens did not know, from working in Gray’s Inn as a teenager through to his famous long, all but manic, night walks taken all his life.

 

Particularly interesting was Richard’s regular referral back to contemporary maps.  He look a passage in a book, perhaps just a reference of someone noting a glance from a window, and then he traced it ‘in the flesh’.  For a view noted by Miss Flite in Bleak House, the maps helped to show that, whilst the view doesn’t work now, a certain building did not appear until the later nineteenth century so, for Dickens, the view was real.

 

The only disappointment of the evening was to discover that The Old Curiosity Shop, familiar to many of you just across from the LSE Library, was certainly not real, with Dickens noting that the shop of his story ‘had long been pulled down’.  But the current Shop has certainly been labelled such since around 1868 and Dickens would have known the building so it is certainly part of Dickens’ London if not the story itself.

 

The talk was perfectly placed for a livery company with Caroline Turnbull-Hall noting the livery connection with St Bartholomew.  And whilst it only lasted an hour, a lifetime’s worth of things to look up and look out for on any walk around London was provided.

 

Carrie de Silva