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Charles Dickens. Public Executions. David Copperfield.
DIRECTIONS
Exit right from the church. Go right into Tabard Street and, towards the end on the left, go through the gates into the gardens, where opposite is the other side of the Marshalsea Prison wall, which has a truly sinister air when viewed on a cold, wet, winter’s day.
DIRECTIONS
Backtrack, turning left along Tabard Street. Continue over the crossing and ahead into Tabard Street’s continuation. Take the first right into Sylvester Street. Cautiously cross Great Dover Street. Keep ahead into Swan Street, at the end of which, turn left onto Trinity Church Square. The houses that now line your way date from the 1820s and, as you turn first right, you pass on the left Trinity Church itself. Follow the square as it veers left. Go first right into Brockham Street. Continue over Harper Road and into Newington Gardens, where there is a board giving a history of Horsemonger Lane Gaol, which stood on this site until 1878.
Dickens came to the gaol on 13th November 1849, to see the public execution of Frederick and Maria Manning – a husband and wife who had conspired to murder Mrs Manning’s young lover. Dickens had come specifically to watch the behaviour of the crowd, and was disgusted by the ‘wickedness and levity’, ‘the brutal mirth or callousness’ that he witnessed. In a subsequent letter to The Times he concluded, ‘I do not believe that any community can prosper where such a scene of horror and demoralization… is presented at the doors of good citizens…’DIRECTIONS
Leave the gardens. Go left along Harper Road, crossing diagonally right over Newington Causeway, using the crossings wherever possible, and keeping ahead towards Borough Road. Turn first right into Stones End Street. The Scovell Estate, to the left, occupies the site of the King’s Bench Prison, where Mr Micawber – the character based on John Dickens – was imprisoned for debt in David Copperfield.
DIRECTIONS
Turn left into Great Suffolk Street, first right into Toulmin Street, passing Pickwick Street on the right, and go next right into Lant Street.
The Charles Dickens Primary School, immediately on the right, stands on the site where the 12-year-old Charles lodged in the house of one Archibald Russell, an agent for the Insolvent Court, during his father’s incarceration in the Marshalsea. ‘A back attic was found for me,’ he later recalled, ‘A bed and bedding were… made up on the floor… and when I took possession of my new abode, I thought I was in paradise.’ He could take breakfast with his parents and brothers in the prison before setting out to walk to work at Warren’s Blacking Factory, via one of the most squalid and unsavoury parts of London. Everything he saw lodged in his childhood memory, and in later life, he would draw upon these experiences time and again in his novels. By his own admission he later immortalized Mr and Mrs Russell as the Garlands in The Old Curiosity Shop.
Bob Sawyer, a medical student at Guy’s Hospital, and ‘a carver and cutter of live people’s bodies’ had lodgings in Lant Street in Pickwick Papers. Although it is now a modern thoroughfare with none of its 19th-century character, it has a curious, almost forgotten feel about it. In Pickwick Papers Dickens relates what this area was like. ‘There is a repose about Lant Street… which sheds a gentle melancholy upon the soul… its dullness is soothing… The majority of the inhabitants either direct their energies to the letting of furnished apartments or devote themselves to the healthful and invigorating pursuit of mangling… The population is migratory… His Majesty’s revenues are seldom collected in this happy valley, the rents are dubious and the water communication is very frequently cut off.’
With these utopian thoughts of a bygone age, go left along Borough High Street where a little way along is Borough Station and the end of this walk.
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