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Charles Dickens’s inimitable depictions of Victorian London have given him a deserved reputation as a bard of the modern city. Probably no author has represented more skillfully the vibrancy and misery of the London streets or conveyed so poignantly the tumult, filth, hilarity, and pathos of their chaotic whirl. Often, despite the characteristically epic sweep of Dickens’s urban storytelling, that whirl centers upon and emanates from the confined space of the Victorian prison. Dickens’s earliest sketches of the London streets, collected and published as Sketches by Boz in 1836, include extended views of Newgate in “Scenes—The Criminal Courts” and “A Visit to Newgate,” and his essay “The Prisoners’ Van” describes juvenile offenders being hauled away from the Police Office in Bow Street. Thereafter, he wrote repeatedly of prisons and prisoners in his fiction: of the Fleet debtors’ prison in The Pickwick Papers, of Newgate again in Oliver Twist and Barnaby Rudge, of...
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References
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Grass, S. (2020). Charles Dickens, the City, and the Prison. In: Tambling, J. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_141-1
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