ABSTRACT
London of that time differed a good deal from the London of today [1901]; it was still more unlike the town in which Dickens lived when writing his earlier books; but the localities which he made familiar to his readers were, on the whole, those which had undergone least change. If Jacob’s Island and Folly Ditch could no longer be seen, the river side showed many a spot sufficiently akin to them, and was everywhere suggestive of Dickens; I had but to lean, at night, over one of the City bridges, and the broad flood spoke to me in the very tones of the master. The City itself, Clerkenwell, Gray’s-Inn Road, the Inns of Court – these places remained much as of old. To this day, they would bear for me something of that old association; but four and twenty years ago, when I had no London memories of my own, they were simply the scenes of Dickens’ novels, with all remoter history enriching their effect on the great writer’s page. The very atmosphere declared him; if I gasped in a fog, was it not Mr Guppy’s ‘London particular’? – if the wind pierced me under a black sky, did I not see Scrooge’s clerk trotting off to his Christmas Eve in Somers Town? We bookish people have our consolations for the life we do not live. In time I came to see London with my own eyes, but how much better when I saw it with those of Dickens!
