Dickens’s London

Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853) is a novel hugely concerned with place. From the opening paragraph of the book, Dickens evokes striking images as he details the streets of London: “Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers … [lose] their foothold at street corners … [and add] new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating compound interest” (5). Throughout the book, the locations are characters in their own right. They evoke feeling, tone, and atmosphere. To experience the places that inspired Dickens, I set out into the streets of London to find and observe specific locations detailed in Bleak House.

Lincoln’s Inn, situated on Chancery Lane in Holborn, is one of the four Inns of Court in London to which lawyers of England and Wales belong. In Bleak House is the site of Kenge and Carboy’s offices and the Lord Chancellor’s affairs. It is mentioned in the book’s opening lines, “London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall” (5). Lincoln’s Inn Fields is also Mr. Tulkinghorn’s headquarters. As the site stands today, beautiful, manicured gardens frame spacious squares and important brick buildings. Multiple types of architecture come together: the Old Hall is a beautiful example of Tudor Architecture, and the Great Hall is done in Tudor Revival style. It is not difficult to see how the site was an inspiration for Dickens as an embodiment of tradition and grandeur.

Cursitor Street is just to the east of Lincoln’s Inn, jutting out of Chancery Lane. It is a quiet, narrow street packed with brick and glass facades. There is construction going on, places to eat, and what appear to be a few retail services and offices. Potted green shrubs stand neatly outside the entrances of some buildings. In Bleak House, it is the site of Krook’s rag and bottle shop, the residence of Miss Flite, Gridley, Nemo, and Weevle, and Sol’s Arms tavern. It is portrayed as a musty, cramped shop that sells bones, scraps, law books, and the trash of others. The street as it stands today does not have a trace of the dismal, dingy area that Dickens depicts in cringe causing detail.

Hatton Garden lies further east and north of Cursitor Street on the opposite side of Holborn Hill. It is London’s jewelry quarter and the heart of the UK diamond trade. As I explored the area, I observed multiple couples and husbands to be peering in shop windows examining wedding rings. I passed De Beers, Diamond Heaven, Bernstones, and Diamonds Rocks among a vast array of other fine jewelry shops. In Bleak House, this is the undesirable area which the Jellyby’s move to after becoming bankrupt. In reality, this area stands in stark contrast to Dickens’s portrayal of it on paper.

Connecting the locations about which Dickens wrote to their present day counterparts helps me to envision the events of Bleak House in vivid detail. I imagine Krook swaggering down a more dilapidated Cursitor Street, and Tulkinghorn pacing in his room in Lincoln’s Inn Fields as his eyes dart across the manicured horizon of lawns before him. Perhaps the description that remains most similar to date is that of the fog. The fog that continues to flow, roll, creep, lie, hover, droop, and pinch as it moves over London.

Westminster Abbey

Westminster Abbey is an architectural treasure. It is a mixture of many architectural styles, but is a particularly stunning example of the English Early Gothic style. Pointed arches, ribbed vaulting, flying buttresses, and rose windows can be found throughout the magnificent structure. The main arches of the Abbey are elaborately molded, and the marble columns are polished and shine brilliantly. Having grown up with a father who is an architect by profession and having studied architecture myself, I was particularly attuned to the structure of the building as I moved about the space. I found myself intensely enchanted by three specific parts of Westminster Abbey: the Sanctuary, the Choir, and the Poet’s Corner.

The heart of the Abbey is the Sanctuary, where the High Altar lies. An inscription towards the top of the altar reads: “The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ.” This particularly caught my attention, as it is from the book of Revelation which I studied and analyzed countless times in Catholic school. Two candlesticks frame the altar, and the light in the church is enough to make the Last Supper mosaic glisten. The mosaic is dominated by gold and ornamented by deep reds and light blues. Directly behind a screen are the altar doors to St Edward’s chapel, which are surrounded by four statues of St Paul, St Peter, King David, and Moses. The large amount of religious imagery and the soft, glistening light that the alter reflects make it a uniquely contemplative, reverential place.

Directly before the High Altar is a worn marble pavement known as the Cosmati pavement. Tiny pieces of colored marble make patterns within a plain marble ground. The tones of the colors are subdued, mainly a rusty red and a deep forest green with splashes of blue here and there. The small pieces of marble come together to form detailed patterns within circles within squares. Though there are multiple circles within this work, each contains a distinct pattern and combinations of different colors. One is tidy and precise: a green and white tessellation of many tiny, six-pointed stars. A second looks as if someone had taken a naturally formed rock with many layers of sediment and split it in the middle, revealing the history of the individual layers as they piled over each other. I was drawn to this piece at first by the beauty of the meticulous patterns, and became more interested as I considered it geologically. It looks like it contains many types of quartz, flint, glauconite, and ceramic tile.

The Choir was the second architectural beauty that captivated my attention. It was done in the Victorian Gothic style. An austere, checker-boarded marble floor in black and white stands in stark contrast to the stalls both in color and in decoration. The wood is a warm, deep brown, the small lights are crowned with red tops, and the stalls are ornamented with a vibrant gold. The marble is a plain and rigidly geometric pattern, whereas the wood and gold of the stalls are heavily embellished with complex, curvilinear detail.

As I made my way into the South Transept of the Abbey, I quite literally walked across the Poet’s Corner. Unlike the High Altar and the Choir, I was not drawn to this particular place for its architectural splendor. The beauty of this treasure instead lay in the aura of awe it produced. Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, John Masefield, William Camden, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, John Milton, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and more famous writers – all buried or memorialized within this small space. Marble and stone plaques in shades of blue, yellow, gray, and black fit neatly next to one another. Seeing multiple prominent writers whose works I have read commemorated together within a single six by six rectangle of ground was moving.

I would greatly recommend going to West Minster Abbey to anyone who has not yet gone! Whether you go out of historical, architectural, religious, musical, literary, or geological interest, I am certain that the Abby will intrigue you, astonish you, and make you want to come back.