Some early London homes of Charles Dickens

Visitors to London who are lovers of the novels of Charles Dickens are doubtless familiar with the house in Doughty Street (not far from the British Museum) where Dickens lived as a young man and wrote some of his early novels, including Oliver Twist.

However, they may not be aware that several other streets in London were home to Charles Dickens at various stages in his life, although the Dickens pilgrim will, in most cases, only have a blue plaque to view as more recent developments have swept away nearly all these 19^th century buildings. The following houses were lived in by the young Charles Dickens between the ages of 10 and 12.

Bayham Street, Camden Town

The Dickens family moved from Chatham (Kent) to London in June 1822, to 16 Bayham Street. Charles would have been ten years old at the time, which was coincidentally about the same age as the small terraced house into which the growing family crowded itself. At the time Camden Town was virtually a village on the outskirts of London, with open fields between it and the city, some three miles distant.

Charles did not move in with the rest of the family at first, because he stayed put in Chatham where he lodged with his schoolmaster William Giles to continue his education. He probably joined the family in Bayham Street in September 1822, and his childhood, which had previously been a happy one, then took on a much darker hue.

The house was demolished in 1910, but a blue plaque was erected to mark the spot. One small window was rescued from the site and is now in the possession of the Dickens Museum.

Gower Street North

John Dickens, Charles’s father, was notoriously bad with money and was constantly in debt. John therefore proposed that his wife Elizabeth should open a school in a better part of town, closer to the centre, to be known as “Mrs Dickens’s Establishment”. This was to be in the family’s new home at 4 Gower Street North, itself a brand-new building, with six rooms and thus much more space than the house in Bayham Street had. 

The family moved in at Christmas 1823, but the stay was a short one. For one thing, the school idea never got off the ground, there being no evidence that even a single pupil ever enrolled with Mrs Dickens. Charles was given a job by a family friend at a shoe-blacking warehouse on the banks of the Thames, so that some extra income could help to pay for the extra expenses of their new home. Charles long regarded this period as the darkest of his young life (it was possibly around the date of his 12^th birthday, in February 1824, when he started work).

There is no trace today of the house at Gower Street, the site of which is covered in part by University College Hospital.

Little College Street, Camden Town

Disaster struck the Dickens family on 20^th February 1824 when John Dickens was arrested for debt and sent to the Marshalsea prison. Mrs Dickens and the three youngest children moved into the prison, eventually giving up the tenancy of the house in Gower Street, but Charles, still working at the blacking factory, was lodged with a Mrs Roylance at Little College Street, not far from Bayham Street. 

Charles now had a form of independence, but he had to support himself on his small earnings from the blacking factory, to which he walked five miles each way. What he did not know was that he lived with Mrs Roylance and her family rent-free, as the guest of a family friend.

Charles only stayed there for a few weeks in 1824, as he missed the company of his family and begged his father to be allowed to live closer to the Marshalsea, which was south of the river.

Little College Street was renamed College Place in 1887, but Mrs Roylance’s house was demolished in 1890.

1 Lant Street, Borough

Charles lodged here for a short period in 1824, prior to his father’s release from the Marshalsea on 28^th May. We know that his room overlooked a timber yard, but, being out at work all day and visiting his family at the Marshalsea in the evening, he doubtless did little there apart from sleep, so the “noises off” would have bothered him little. For the young Charles, having a room of his own, and his family just round the corner, this was “Paradise”, to use his own word.

  

Lant Street still exists, but the row of houses including No 1 was demolished in 1974. Visitors can see neither the house nor the Marshalsea (apart from one stretch of the outer wall), but they can walk along nearby Marshalsea St, Pickwick St, Sawyer St, Copperfield St (and others named after Dickens characters) and see the Charles Dickens Primary School on Lant St itself.

© John Welford