This feature first appeared in 2023 on Londonist: Time Machine, our much-praised history newsletter.
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A few years back, for a laugh, I read every single Dickens novel. All 15 of them. One after another. And then I read his five Christmas Books, followed by the collection of his early short fiction and non-fiction known as Sketches by Boz. I read well over 4 million words of Dickens which, to put it into absurd solipsistic context, is like reading this article 1,700 times, in quantity if not quality. It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.
Because I’m me, I didn’t just read these books. I also made notes about locations. Specifically, I jotted down every single time a London location was mentioned, across all 21 books. If anyone wants to see it, I have a 714-row spreadsheet listing out every named place, and the books in which each one appears.
Spreadsheets are crap for editorial purposes, though, so a map HAD to be made. I started off plotting all the points on a Google Map. This worked to some extent, but was a bit glitchy, and not particularly easy on the eye. So, that’s where this article comes in. I’ve started from scratch with the data and redrawn Dickens’s geo-literary output — his geobibliome, as I'm pompously calling it — as a proper map.
What the Dickens?
Above, you’ll find a high-resolution version of the full map. A click or a tap and it should open (obviously, it’ll look better on a bigger screen, rather than a smartphone). In case the embed doesn’t work, you can also find the file uploaded here.
I started with the Pickwick Papers, Dickens’s first novel. Every time he mentioned a street or a building, I would note it on my spreadsheet and draw it onto my map. I worked my way through all 21 books in this manner, adding ever more locations to the growing chart. It didn’t matter whether the location formed the backdrop to a major scene, or if it was only mentioned in passing. If Dickens gave it a namecheck, then it got transposed.
I’ve also made a stab at mapping fictional buildings and businesses. Clues in the text give us a good idea of where we might find such esteemed enterprises as Mr Turveydrop's Dance Academy from Bleak House, or Tellson’s Bank in a Tale of Two Cities. One famous example is the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters from Our Mutual Friend — usually equated with the real (and excellent) The Grapes pub in Limehouse. I also did the same for the homes of important characters. Sometimes, we don’t get enough clues to deduce an accurate location, which is why you won’t find every famous character on the map. Finally, I also added the many, many London homes Dickens inhabited throughout his life (see footnote 1).
The finished chart shows every mappable London location from the Dickens novels. It helps us visualise which bits of the capital Dickens chose to focus on. The southern portion of the City and the Strand area, for example, are particularly dense with activity. Perhaps even more interestingly, the map allows us to see, at a glance, which bits of town the author pooh-poohed in his major works. Let’s take a deeper look…
Which London locations does Dickens love to talk about?
Take a look at the map and certain areas leap out as the most crowded.
It’s no surprise to find the Square Mile so heavily populated. Dickens’s novels are replete with City businessmen. Scrooge and his late partner Marley kept their counting house somewhere off Cornhill. The more enlightened Cheeryble brothers trade from the vicinity of Threadneedle Street. Dombey and Son are nearby, as are Clennam and Doyce.
As well as a healthy character stock, the City also provides many arenas for drama. The Old Bailey courthouse and adjacent Newgate jail appear in ten of the novels, as well as in Sketches by Boz. The Inns of Court — London’s main districts for the legal professions — are also heavily represented. Dickens himself worked as a solicitor’s clerk and was never shy of including a lawyer or two in his novels. St Paul’s, of course, appears in almost every book — often as a background feature rather than a primary setting. Ditto the Houses of Parliament.
Various West End districts also figure prominently. The area around the Strand and up into Covent Garden is particularly dense. Dickens lived and worked around here at various times in his career and found these lively streets an infinite source of inspiration. Other parts of the West End are less crowded and fairly evenly populated.
Dickens occasionally goes south of the river, with a fair bit of density around Borough High Street. This was not only the oldest and busiest area to the south, but also a key part of Dickens’s personal history. His father John Dickens was imprisoned for debt at the Marshalsea just off Borough High Street, and the teenage Dickens lodged nearby for a while. Little Dorrit, in particular, explores this area.
Which bits of London does Dickens never visit?
Here’s something: Charles Dickens never mentions a London railway station by name in any of his 15 novels (nor in the other books I read). I think I’m the first person to discover this. It’s curious, isn’t it? He certainly had the opportunity. London’s earliest railway, from Spa Road in Bermondsey to Greenwich, opened in February 1836. The first instalment of The Pickwick Papers — Dickens’s first novel — appeared just a few weeks later. In other words, his writing career perfectly coincided with the railway age. Dickens even survived a rail crash, which killed 10 of his fellow passengers, towards the end of his career.
Trains do make prominent appearances in several novels, most notably Dombey and Son, which features the carving up of Camden Town. But Dickens never describes a railway station by name. I’m not sure why. It seems to be a general feature of Dickens’s writing that he obsesses more over the places he knew from his formative years rather than dwelling on new developments (the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park, for example, was a massive deal, but plays no part in his novels).
Dickens lived long enough to see the completion of several underground railways. The first, the Metropolitan, was completed in 1863, seven and a half years before his death. It sliced through his former stomping grounds along the Euston Road but, by this point, he’d moved out of the area to Gad’s Hill Place in Kent. There’s no evidence he ever took a ride on the underground, and he certainly didn’t write about it.
A glance at the map shows more obvious omissions. How spartan is the East End? Dickens mentions many of the main districts — Stepney, Whitechapel, Wapping — but he rarely takes his characters there. There are exceptions, of course. Our Mutual Friend opens along the river near Limehouse; Bill Sikes lives up in Bethnal Green. But given the author’s reputation for championing the poor and vulnerable, I had great expectations for more action out to the east (see footnote 2). There’s a whole PhD thesis to be written on this one.
Other, more affluent areas see ne’er a flourish of the author’s goose quill. Kensington is one big blank. There’s literally nothing west of the Edgware Road save one mention of Paddington in Sketches by Boz. Victoria and Pimlico are a land of prisons surrounded by nothing. The Regent’s Canal serves as a northern boundary to the Dickensian imagination (at least on the inner London map). Only a few hardy characters like Nicodemus Boffin push through it. To be fair, these suburbs were not as substantial as we see today, but nor were they entirely empty.
In the other direction, the South Bank is largely out of bounds. In Dickens’s day, and up until the mid-20th century, the area was largely industrial and little-visited by the wider populace. The one exception is Astley’s Circus. Among the most famous entertainment venues of its day, Astley’s is mentioned in Bleak House, the Old Curiosity Shop and Sketches by Boz.
Finally, look at the gap west of St James’s Park. There’s no Green Park, and there’s no Buckingham Palace. The Palace had been the main royal home from Victoria's accession in 1837 — again, around the time Pickwick was published — yet Dickens never found a need to mention it in his novels. He had a curious non-relationship with the Queen. According to biographer Claire Tomalin, Dickens admitted to being hopelessly in love with the young monarch, even moping outside Windsor Castle on the night of her wedding (yes, a bit creepy). Yet he turned down her many invitations for an audience (see footnote 3). Who snubs Queen Victoria? He seems to have also snubbed Buckingham Palace, as it’s not mentioned once. St James’s and Kensington Palace do get a few call-outs, though.
I’ll leave things there. Just to say that if you enjoy fictional mapping, I’ve also put together a couple of books you might enjoy. The award-winning Atlas of Imagined Places is a world atlas of fictional towns, cities and countries. Its sequel, Atlas of Imagined Cities, takes city maps of London, LA, New York, Tokyo and other big cities and shows where fictional characters lived within them.
Footnotes
1. I’m indebted to the Victorian Web site for its definitive list.
2. Part of the reason is that the East End hadn’t quite reached its peak reputation for crushing poverty during the time that Dickens was writing. He focussed more on the rookeries of St Giles and other inner city areas of deprivation. Most novelists of the time ignored the East End, partly out of their own ignorance of the area, and partly because their readers would not be familiar with the setting.
3. The pair met for the first and only time in 1870, just a few months before Dickens’s death. It is curious that the two most famous people of their age, and the two whose names are adjectival for the 19th century (Victorian, Dickensian), only spoke on this one occasion.
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