As our Christmas Carol walk weaves through the City of London and then snakes up to the Charles Dickens Museum in Doughty Street, it’s fascinating to see how markets, taverns, financial institutions, housing and public buildings of Dickens’ day often still purposefully coexist with their gleaming glass modern counterparts.
Helen Cann (www.helencann.co.uk) has again complemented the original John Leech illustrations with her own atmospheric depictions of stagecoaches and hackney cabs and cameos of narrow City courts and buildings while the roads keep us on track in modern London. It’s remarkable how much of the ‘good old city’ still remains squeezed into the tiny triangle of the City of London between Lombard St, Cornhill and Leadenhall Market, with its Victorian, high-benched taverns, many still working to Victorian opening times (weekday breakfasts and lunches rather than evenings or weekends).
A Christmas Carol is filled with allusions to places and practices that could easily be lost, in particular the associations with graveyards, workhouses and prisons. We are hoping that by bringing these back to the surface as readers walk the route of our map, we continue to enrich the experience of reading this wonderful book.
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