A Charles Dickens tour makes perfect sense in that Dickens was very much a peripatetic, restless man with a particularly acute sense of place and a superlative skill in depicting places in his writings, a skill he once described as being akin to that of a ‘fanciful photographer’. It is thus particularly rewarding to explore the settings, both urban and rural, for his great novels, especially, of course, relevant areas of London (his knowledge of the city was described as being already ‘wonderful’ by one of his fellow clerks in the lawyer’s office where he began earning his living at the age of fifteen). His love/hate relationship with the great city and the myriad, often sensational, contrasts it offered lasted the whole of his life and is central to all his work. At night the streets of London were for him what he called ‘a great magic lantern’ into which he needed to be able to look and he found it a struggle to write when deprived of this unfailing resource.

The tour begins with a visit to the Charles Dickens Museum in Doughty Street, Dickens’s only surviving London residence occupied by him during the crucial years 1837–1839 when he was rocketing to fame with the serial publication of Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby. We later travel to Portsmouth to visit Dickens’s birthplace, now a museum and also his father’s workplace, the Navy Pay Office in the historic Dockyard. Back in London we explore the legal quarter around Lincoln’s Inn, one of the chief settings for Bleak House. Lunch is at one of Dickens’s clubs, the Athenaeum, scene of his memorable reconciliation with Thackeray after many years of estrangement.

The north Kent marshes are the scene of Pip’s fateful encounter with the escaped convict in Great Expectations, and eventually into the ancient cathedral town of Rochester. This picturesque old city, called by Dickens’s friend, John Forster, ‘the birthplace of his fancy’, was the setting for his happy childhood, fated to come to an abrupt end when John Dickens was posted back to London in 1822. Another beneficent place for Dickens featured on the tour is the attractive little seaside resort of Broadstairs where he and his family regularly holidayed between 1837 and 1851 and which he immortalised in a delightful essay called ‘Our English Watering Place’.

As the tour begins with Dickens’s first London home, the ‘first class family mansion’ he was so delighted to lease in 1837, so it ends with the only home he ever owned, his ‘little Kentish freehold’ as he called Gad’s Hill Place, near Higham in Kent. This was his home for the last ten years of his life, the place where he wrote his last three novels, the last being the tantalisingly unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood.

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