"This is a small, delightful book, handsomely produced and shaped to fit an overcoat pocket, describing parts of London associated with Dickens’s life and writings."
——The Literary Review

"Gives us a splendidly clear and illuminating view, not only of the streets and architecture, but of the sounds, smells, and intense human activity that both Dickens and Clark enjoy about London."
——New Horizons

"A rich and wondrously informative book"
——Library Journal

Few novelists have written so intimately about a city in the way that Charles Dickens wrote about London. A nearphotographic memory made his contact with the city indelible from a very young age and it remained his constant focus. Virginia Woolf maintained that, we remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens, as he produces characters who exist not in detail, not accurately or exactly, but abundantly in a cluster of wild yet extraordinarily revealing remarks. But the character he was drawn back to throughout his novels was London itself, all aspects of the capital from the coaching inns of his early years to the taverns and watermen of the Thames; these were the constant cityscapes of his life and work. Based on five walks through central London, Peter Clark illuminates the settings of Dickens s greatest works, his life, his journalism and his fiction. He also explores The First Suburbs (Camden Town, Chelsea, Greenwich, Hampstead, Highgate and Limehouse) as they feature in Dickens s writing.

PETER CLARK is a writer, translator, and consultant who was Director of the British Council in Syria (1992–1997). He has written books on Marmaduke Pickthall and Wilfred Thesiger, and has translated fiction and non-fiction from Arabic.