In fact doing the research was very enlightening. I decided early on that the best way of tackling it was to take some of Dickens's most gloomily eloquent descriptions of places in London and themes in its history, and tie them together with a very loose narrative. It brought home to me how so much of his work was driven by a sense of social conscience arising from that traumatic early experience of his father ending up in the Marshalsea debtor's prison, and Dickens himself having to work in a blacking factory. So my view of him rather shifted and that was what I wanted to put across.
In the end the date selected was Sunday September 23rd. This was so that Ms Vale could run the social side of the Meetup, and that particular day was the only one in the course of three months she and I could both make. That Sunday saw easily the worst weather in London so far this year. I got to the starting point, the George Inn in Southwark, to find a handful of people huddling away from the torrential rain and violent wind outside. I wondered whether, if the handful remained a handful, we could justify simply staying in the pub and doing all the readings there. Dr Bones even made it from Oxford and brought Boots the dog with her, introducing him to the underground as well as to some of the worst weather he can have experienced. 'We don't normally allow dogs indoors,' said the young man on the bar, 'But considering ...' Eventually the group reached the amazing total of about twenty attenders so we did indeed set out, blown and battered down through Southwark, past the Cross Bones Graveyard and along the Thames to Blackfriars, across to St Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe and Newgate, and finally along Fleet Street to finish up at Gladstone's statue just opposite the site of Dickens's publishers. People were kind enough to say that the meteorological conditions added to the atmosphere.
Photograph by Mrs Alyson Pacanowski.
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