Dickens in Southwark

I have a useful booklet called Charles Dickens and Southwark, from Southwark Libraries, so I caught the bus and went looking for Dickens.  Seeing Lant Street from the bus I hastily got off; this is where Dickens lived as a boy when his father was imprisoned in the Marshalsea Debtor's prison and he was sent to work in a blacking factory. Why Marshalsea?  Because the King's Marshall was overseer of debt collection.

  It was an eerie feeling, walking in Dickens' footsteps, down Lant Street and Mint Street, by Union Street, where, I think, the workhouse once was and on to Borough High Street.  Today lots of the streets around are called by names from his novels; Quilp St. Copperfield St. and there is a Little Dorrit Park.  I walked up Borough High Street to St. George the Martyr Church , built 1734, where Little Dorrit slept in the vestry when she was locked out of the Marshalsea one night.  Across the road the very last remaining wall of the Marshalsea runs  along the churchyard.  Carved paving stones memorialise the unfortunate debtors locked up there.  The prison of King's Bench was on the other side of the road; more well-to-do debtors were imprisoned there. 

All along Borough High Street there used to be coaching inns where coaches and wagons coming into London unloaded.   The George is famous as the very last inn to retain its upper galleries, where in Elizabethan times spectators would sit to watch the players, on a raised stage in the inn yard.  At the Russia House I could see Jacobean or older timbers, revealed under later plasterwork, At the Tabard is a memorial to John Harvard, born in Southwark, who sailed to Massachusetts in 1637, founder of Harvard College.  The 16th century St.l Christopher's Inn was once on the site of Kentish Buildings, and is remembered in a plaque at the yard entrance.  All those old entrances are still there, paved with huge, uneven cobbles that must have been there in Dickens' time too.

Dickens in Borough

I have been reading Claire Tomalin's biography of Charles Dickens.  He was born on 7 February 1812, so he has just had his 200th birthday.  There is a wonderful exhibition all about him at the Museum of London.  You can almost smell the filth in the streets.

Dicken's father was unfortunately not good with money and when Dickens was twelve his father was imprisoned in the Marshalsea Debtors' Prison which stood by St. George's Church in Borough High Street.  Debtors stayed in prison until their debts were paid.  Young Charles Dickens went into lodgings in an attic in Lant Street and was sent to work in a blacking factory by Hungerford Stairs.  He walked to work through Mint Street and past the workhouse, probably wondering if that was where he would end up.  Dickens described the Borough area in Pickwick Papers and Little Dorrit.   King's Bench Prison, where Mr. Micawber was imprisoned, was nearby, and also Horsemonger Gaol.  People living in Bath Row used to let their rooms out to spectators of public hangings.  Dickens saw these and was a strong supporter of abolition
 of public executions.

All that is left of the Marshalsea is one long wall, at the back of St. George's Churchyard.  The streets around are named for Dickens characters, and the park is Little Dorrit Park.  But walk along Borough High Street from St. George's Church towards London Bridge and on the right hand side there are still the old entrances to the coaching inns which lined the road when London Bridge was the only roadway across the Thames.  The George Inn still has its galleries looking over the inn yard, just like the inns where strolling players performed before Shakespeare's Globe and the other old theatres of the area were built.



Down by London Bridge is the entrance to Borough Market, go there on Thursdays, Fridays or Saturdays to enjoy the speciality foods, the cheeses, the breads, the sausages and pies.  Sample currys cooked in enormous shallow pans over gas stoves.  Then go down to the Thames and see the replica of the Golden Hind, so small it is impossible to imagine Sir Francis Drake and his crew sailing round the world in her.