Dickens described London as a magic lantern, a popular entertainment of the Victorian era, which projected images from slides. Of all Dickens's characters, "none played as important a role in his work as that of London itself"; it fired his imagination and made him write. (In a letter to John Forster in 1846, Dickens wrote "a day in London sets me up and starts me", but outside of the city, "the toil and labour of writing, day after day, without that magic lantern is IMMENSE!!"

However, of the identifiable London locations that Dickens used in his work, scholar Clare Pettitt notes that many no longer exist and, while "you can track Dickens' London, and see where things were, but they aren't necessarily still there").

In addition to his later novels and short stories, Dickens's descriptions of London, published in various newspapers in the 1830s, were released as a collected edition Sketches by Boz in 1836.

Dickens's first novel The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (also known as The Pickwick Papers) follows the travels of the club's members around England and, between them, they stay in over one hundred Inns during their journeys. A selection of those in the London area, including the George and Vulture in Lombard Street and the Golden Cross at Charing Cross, were the subject of Bertram Waldrom Matz's 1921 book The inns & taverns of "Pickwick", with some observations on their other associations, and still feature on Pub crawl guides today.

Let’s jump back in time. Imagine yourself in the London of the early 19th century. The homes of the upper and middle class exist in close proximity to areas of unbelievable poverty and filth. Personal cleanliness is not a big priority, nor is clean laundry. In close, crowded rooms the smell of unwashed bodies is stifling. In Little Dorrit Dickens describes a London rain storm: “In the country, the rain would have developed a thousand fresh scents, and every drop would have had its bright association with some beautiful form of growth or life. In the city, it developed only foul stale smells, and was a sickly, lukewarm, dirt-stained, wretched addition to the gutters”.

Through his writing, Charles Dickens paints the Victorian Era as a time that was dirty, dark, and crude, especially for those who were living in the lower class. Although his writing could be very critical, it’s clear that he truly did love England, and he wanted it to be better.

More information is on:

1). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickens%27s_London

2). https://www.charlesdickenspage.com/charles-dickens-london.html