Charles Dickens, photographed in 1867 by Jeremia Gurney and London in the 19th century • WIKIMEDIA COMMONS / ISTOCKPHOTO No one better than Charles Dickens was able to capture the two facets of the London of his time. The bright side of the leap into modernity, and the dark side of child poverty and exploitation. A relentless city for the poor However, Dickens was not born in London, but in Portsmouth. It was not until he was 10 years old that John and Elizabeth, his parents, settled in a yellow brick house on Bayham Street, in the district of Camden, then on the outskirts of London. Like all the houses in the neighborhood, it is small, but new. Besides his parents and four brothers, a cousin and a servant also live there. John Forster, a friend and biographer of Dickens, described Camden as "the poorest part of the suburbs", which was in fact not the case. In 1822, Camden was the middle-class neighborhood, home to merchants and professional employees. Forster reacts as we do today to the mention of the adjective "Dickensian." Immediately come to mind images of poor, dirty, starving children, dreadful factories and filthy streets. If it is true that Dickens was soon confronted with this dark side, this moment had not yet arrived. At the end of 1823, the Dickens moved to 4 North Gower Street, near Euston, to a house twice as large and more centrally located. In this district, the streets are paved and life is more expensive. The Dickens already have seven children, and the money is constantly running out. David Copperfield is probably Dickens' most autobiographical novel. We see the character of Mr Micawber, condensed from the poor, but optimistic man, who thinks that he will always get by. Dickens was inspired by his father, John, to create this character. Micawber is the author of the famous phrase:“Annual income, 20 pounds sterling; annual expenditure, 19 pounds, 19 shillings, 6 pence; result:happiness. Annual income £20; annual expenditure £20, 6 pence; result:misery. The reality that the Dickens family lives in very quickly begins to look like the second version of this equation. In all eras, of course, but especially in Dickensian times, London was a pleasant city for the wealthy, but implacable for the poor. To the first, it offered multiple entertainments and the latest technical innovations such as the train, the metro, the telegraph or electricity, all of which appeared during the life of the writer. The poor, on the other hand, are forced to work 12 hours a day for a salary that sometimes does not even allow them to afford a bed and support themselves. In a room near the factory It was then that Charles Dickens discovered the dark side of London. To cope with the growing family debts, he was torn from his peaceful life as a middle-class child at the age of 12, taken out of school and sent to work in a factory for six shillings a week. Shortly after, her father was arrested on account of a debt of 40 pounds and 10 shillings, and the family was consequently forced to leave the house in North Gower. Little Charles finds himself alone in a room near his factory, while his relatives must settle 4 km away, in Marshalsea prison, a dismal building on the south bank of the Thames, near London Bridge, whose name every indebted Londoner dreaded. In 19 th England century, a debtor can be imprisoned until his debt is repaid. Moreover, since prisons are not public, but private, they make prisoners pay for their “stay”, so that the cost of stewardship is added to the debt that led to their incarceration. If one is poor, which is the case of the Dickens, it is customary for the family to transfer to prison with the debtor in order to save money. In 19 th England century, a debtor can be imprisoned until his debt is repaid. The prisoners live together in small cells in which up to 12 people can be crammed. It is therefore not surprising that these people died of starvation or disease, of cold in winter (of course, there was no heating) or of heat in summer. At Marshalsea, prisoners who could afford it had access to a bar, restaurant and shop, and even enjoyed the privilege of walking out of the prison within the day. But, for the vast majority, the prison for debts was a pit from which it was difficult to extract oneself. In another Dickens novel, La Petite Dorrit , William Dorrit's character has been imprisoned in Marshalsea for so long that his children grew up in prison. In many cases, prisoners depended on their relatives to raise the money necessary for their release. Charles contributed to this effort as much as possible by working at Warren's Blacking Factory, a shoe polish factory on Hungerford Stairs, between the Strand and the river, which would later move to Covent Garden. The experience is traumatic for him. He confesses that until the factory was demolished, he did not have “the courage to revisit these places which witnessed [his] servitude […]. For many years, whenever chance brought [him] into the neighborhood […], [he crossed] the road. The long 10-hour days leave deep scars:“Nothing can express the secret agony of my soul […]. My whole nature has been so pervaded by the unjust humiliations of which I have been the victim […] that even now this infamous specter […] haunts me. He was lucky in his misfortune, however, as his job, sealing and labeling the shoe polish jars, was one of the least arduous in the factory. A few shillings to finally live David Copperfield reflects the distress felt by Dickens:“I know the world too well now to wonder much at what is going on, but I am surprised even now at how easily I was abandoned at such a tender age. It seems to me extraordinary that no one has intervened in favor of a child who is very intelligent, ardent, affectionate, delicate in body and soul. But no one intervened and I found myself at the age of 10 a little labourer” in a factory. The exploitation of children in factories and for all kinds of work was then common in London. It was not until 1833 that the government prohibited the hiring of children under 9 years old. It was not until 1833 that the British government prohibited the hiring of children under the age of 9. John Dickens moved in and out of Marshalsea over the next few years. While Charles has been working at the factory for a year, John happily insists that he leave the factory and go back to school. However, three years later, young Dickens had to drop out of school for good, as his father could no longer afford it. He then entered as a clerk in a law firm, Ellis &Blackmore, thanks to an acquaintance of his mother. He is 15 years old, and his initial salary of 12 shillings per week quickly rises to 30 shillings. This money allows him to savor the pleasures that London can offer to a young man. For the first time, he can afford to go to the theatre, dine out occasionally and discover the city. Dickens familiarizes himself with all the court districts and the City. Clustered around Holborn, Fleet Street, the Strand and Chancery Lane were the Inns of Court, buildings where the city's lawyers lived, studied and worked since the Middle Ages, and where Dickens himself lived for some time. . The Inns, equivalent to solicitors' offices, were at the heart of London's legal activity, but they also provided accommodation for their members. Dickens describes them in The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club as "old and strange places, with countless nooks, alleys, corridors". These places, along with law and lawyers, are recurring themes in his novels. First steps in writing Dickens often describes Lincoln's Inn Fields as a spooky, now peaceful place in London that lawyers still walk through clutching their briefcases on their way to court. Turning the corner of this square, in discreet Portsmouth Street, Dickens passed a small shop which was then already considered the oldest in London and which is still there today:The Old Curiosity Shop, which naturally inspired The Antique Shop . Gray's Inn (one of the Inns) is mentioned as well in David Copperfield than in The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club . Dickens' last unfinished novel, The Edwin Drood Mystery , says of the peaceful square of the historic Staple Inn in Holborn, that it "gives the pedestrian, when he has entered it after leaving the noisy street, the impression of having put cotton in his ears and velvet soles on the feet". Having learned shorthand, Dickens began working as a reporter with newspapers. At the same time, he publishes short stories, "sketches" of London, under the pseudonym of Boz. Shortly after, in 1836, the first episodes of what would become his first novel, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, were published. , recounting the adventures of a group of friends traveling in the country. The character of Sam Weller, introduced in the fourth issue, is a Cockney valet (an East End slum dweller) with an encyclopedic knowledge of London (and who, when the reader discovers him, cleans his boots master with a shoe polish that "would have made Mr. Warren die of envy"). Sales of the soap opera soared with the arrival of Weller. Dickens discovers that London interests his readers and that London ensures the sales. And he almost immediately acquires great fame. A tireless walker, Dickens roamed the streets of London, where he used to cover between 8 and 40 km a day. The writer tirelessly roamed the streets of the British capital, absorbing the substance of the city like a sponge. He used to cover between 8 and 40 km a day, at a pace he said was just over 7 km per hour. These distances seem staggering to us today, but Londoners of that time walked far more than the modern city dweller. Most of Dickens' walks were at night, as he suffered from insomnia. In a letter dating from 1863, he explains traveling between 16 and 84 km at night while working on his book. He strolled north of the river (there were then only a few shops south of the Thames) from Charing Cross and Covent Garden – then bordering Saint Giles, a district of vice and delinquency – and passed through the City to go to Whitechapel:it was the heart of Dickensian London. We must not imagine Dickens walking around London dressed in an austere black frock coat. On the contrary, he often wore boldly cut, colorful clothes, as his fashion outlook and temperament were more in tune with the turn-of-the-century Regency, which saw the birth of dandyism, than with Victorian fashion. For Dickens, who wrote his novels during his walks, London was his “magic lantern”. When he couldn't walk, he was tormented. He knew in depth all the districts of his city “with the precision of a driver”. Covent Garden was the market and the center of a flourishing vice trade. Next door, Drury Lane was synonymous with poverty and filth, while Lowther Arcade, just a few hundred yards away, was where the well-heeled shopped. It was the very nature of London:two opposite and almost contiguous realities that did not mix. The agile step of the writer did not prevent him from noting everything and engraving everything in his astonishing memory. One of his contemporaries wrote that if Dickens were given the name of a street in London, he could tell "all that was there, what each of its shops was, how its called the owner of the grocery store and how many orange peels were thrown on the sidewalk”. A capital with a moving face It was a bustling London, whose congested streets were still under construction, as it was constantly being renovated and modernized at a forced march while expanding. If there were 1 million inhabitants in 1800 and approximately 136,000 houses, at the end of the century there were 6.5 million inhabitants and more than 6 million houses. With the pace of urban transformation, much of Dickensian London quickly disappeared. Of course, you can still visit the house at 48 Doughty Street, where he lived during the 1830s and where he wrote Oliver Twist , The Pickwick Club Posthumous Papers and Nicholas Nickleby , now the Charles-Dickens Museum. Other locations have not changed:in A Christmas Carol for example, the bells that wake Scrooge after the visitations of the ghosts of Christmases past, present and to come are those of the clock of Saint Dunstan-in-the-West, in Fleet Street. The taverns, pubs and restaurants frequented by the author fared better. Most of those he quotes in his novels or talks about in his correspondence still exist. Across the street from where Warren’s Blacking Factory once stood is still his favorite restaurant, Rules. Having become a renowned writer, Dickens reserved a table there by the window to see the place where he had suffered so much as a child while he had lunch. Dickens often went to the George Inn, which he mentions in La Petite Dorrit . As for pubs, Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street was one of his favourites. It is mentioned in A Tale of Two Cities and can boast an impeccable literary pedigree, as it was also frequented by Samuel Johnson and William Butler Yeats. Another pub still standing:The Grapes, in Limehouse, east London. This pub provided a view of the Thames, which is far less crowded with boats and craft today than it was in Dickens' time. The city honored its great writer by interring him in the "Poets' Corner" of Westminster Abbey, under a simple black marble tombstone. There rests a man who lived in his own flesh the cruellest face of London, that of child exploitation, poverty and prison for debt, but who, thanks to the wealth fame, could also enjoy a luxurious, hedonistic and modern London. The two cities cohabited:sometimes it was enough to cross a street to go from unbridled luxury to the most unbearable poverty. Part of Dickens's success was that he allowed the readers of his day, the majority of the upper class, to enter that other London where they dared not or could not venture on their own. And it is this tantalizing invitation that Dickens continues to send to all readers of his novels. Find out more Charles Dickens , by Jean-Pierre Ohl, Gallimard (Folio), 2011.Works (9 vol.) , from Charles Dickens, Gallimard (Pléiade), 1956. The largest city in the world London, which Dickens discovered in 1822 at the age of 10, is very different from the city he last saw when he died in 1870. It has grown from just over 1 million population to almost 4 million, the urban area has expanded considerably. The omnibuses, the train, the metro, public lighting, sewers and urban renovations have changed its appearance. However, in its streets there remains a contrast between wealth and poverty unparalleled in other Western European cities. Prisons open to the public The prison experience was familiar to Londoners. Besides Marshalsea Debt Prison, one could end up in the abominable Newgate Prison, which in Dickens's time was beginning to house death row inmates. This is where Oliver Twist meets Fagin, who is waiting to be hanged. Dickens had known Newgate well and had already described a visit to the prison in 1836 in Sketches of Boz , as on Wednesdays and Thursdays, Newgate was open to the public from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. Exploited childhood If anything was cheap in London, it was child labor, which Dickens had experienced. Like Oliver Twist, children were forced to work in the workhouses in exchange for miserable meals. Others were sold or rented by their families. Sometimes abandoned, they had to support themselves. London was a city swarming with these poor beings offering themselves for a few coins:it is estimated that they were between 10,000 and 20,000 doing street work. They shone shoes, picked up horse droppings (there were tons of it every day in the streets of the city), carried parcels from train and omnibus passengers, were employed as delivery men by shops, brought telegrams , sold newspapers, matches, flowers. The mudlarks were looking for coins or any moneyable waste in the mud of the Thames at low tide. Those who worked as chimney sweeps died of asphyxiation or of "soot wart", the name given to cancer of the scrotum contracted while sweeping chimneys. Poverty in all its forms Dilapidated houses whose window openings are covered with rags and newspapers […], little girls of 14 and 15 going barefoot, with bushy hair and for all clothing large white overcoats, and boys of all ages wearing coats of any size or no coat at all. In 1835, Dickens signed under the pseudonym of Boz this description of a rookery (name of the neighborhoods where the poor, thieves and prostitutes were found) near Covent Garden. The scourge of prostitution In the 19th th century, prostitution took on considerable proportions in London. It is estimated that in the early 1860s, the capital had 80,000 prostitutes, one in ten of whom were under the age of 15. Poverty delivered these young girls to sexual exploitation, at a time when the legal age for having sexual intercourse was set at 12, and in a city where the indigent married as young as 13 or 14. years. Alcohol as an escape from reality In 1835, Dickens signed under the name of Boz the article "The distilleries", in which he noted that the most important of these establishments were close to the poorest enclaves of London. “The consumption of gin is a great vice in England […]; and until you improve the lodgings of the poor, or persuade a half-starved wretch not to seek relief in alcohol by temporarily forgetting his misery and his pittance […], the gin shops will continue to grow in number and appeal. »
