DICKENS’ LONDON

Until the Carnaby Street of the 1960s and, alongside images and experiences provided by war and royal occasions, the iconic images of London have frequently been Victorian. Charles Dickens and Jack the Ripper helped give the capital a reputation for squalor and danger that, despite being just one aspect of London, was an aspect that gripped the popular imagination thanks to the printing press. The same can be said of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. These accounts circulated not only within the Anglosphere but also throughout the wider world, further enhancing London’s somewhat grisly reputation. As well as being the capital of the largest empire in the world it was the centre of many spheres of informal influence. Alongside the physical communications structure, notably the docks and railway stations, were the postal service and telegraphy that moved around ideas and literature.

London became a world city in the 19th century, dramatically so with the Great Exhibition of 1851, thanks to the growth of the empire and the metropolis itself, with its political, commercial and cultural power. This was further marked in London by triumphant monuments to its military heroes, notably in Trafalgar Square but also across central London. National greatness was also on display in new street names, although Dickens could be sceptical about this trend, as shown in his discussion of the Circumlocution Office in and about both economic liberalism and reforming ‘Chadwickism’ in Dickens was also sardonic about MPs, as in with Gregsbury and his “tolerable command of sentences with no meaning in them... whether I look merely at home, or… contemplate the boundless prospect of conquest and possession – achieved by British perseverance and British valour – which is outspread before me, I clasp my hands, and turning my eyes to