No writer’s imagination has been more haunted by London than Charles Dickens (1812-1870) and no writer since has more haunted the spirit of London itself or had such an effect on literary treatments of it. The Dickensian vision of London, city of bustle and crossing-sweepers, the foggy river and the marshes, debtor prisons and old crooked lodging houses, ancient inns-of-court and smoky counting houses, ship chandlers’ stores, taverns and coaching inn yards, is the strongest literary vision of the capital we have. His books spill out its sights, smells, and human collisions. His writing captures the voice of London from the cockney of Sam Weller and Mrs Gamp to the chatter of Mr Jingle. However, he was not born there but in Portsmouth in 1812. In 1816, his father, a clerk in the Naval Office, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, was sent to London for two years until he was moved to the dockyard town of Chatham, Kent, that “mere dream of chalk, and drawbridges, and mastless ships, in a muddy river” Dickens would often use in his novels.
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