![]() ![]() ‘In Dickens’ own time, the way that people lived was not Dickensian, merely life.’ The city was transforming itself at incredible speed. She means that what we think of as ‘Dickens’ London’, a place full of wildly eccentric people and improbable happenings, was in fact the real thing: ‘Much of what we take today to be the marvellous imaginings of a visionary novelist turn out on inspection to be the reportage of a great observer.’ Certainly, many of the incidents she records seem stranger than fiction. Judith Flanders says that Dickens ‘invented London’. ![]() Charles Lamb wrote, ‘I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much Life.’ ![]() It’s been exhausting, smelly, dirty, overwhelming but my goodness, it’s been living, in a city that never sleeps. I’ve had to struggle to walk through the human traffic jams, dodged the wheeled traffic, avoided the eager traders and hawkers with their familiar cries. I’ve eaten on the hoof, buying breakfast on the way to work and if I’m lucky getting a chop and a pint of ale for dinner. I’ve gawped at funerals, executions, fires, runaway horses and street accidents. I’ve been almost deafened by the continuous roar of noise around me, half choked and blinded by the sooty, smoky air. For the past few days I’ve occasionally been leaving my quiet, rural retreat to join the crowds thronging the streets of Victorian London. ![]()
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