London in the Time of Dickens

By the start of the Victorian era, London was home to nearly 2 million people, a number that expanded to more than 6 million by 1901, the year of Queen Victoria's death. This immense growth made the city an astonishing study in the varieties of human experience—the perfect place for a novelist to find his voice. Charles Dickens did just that in the 1830s.

Born in 1812, Dickens spent most of his life in a rapidly expanding London. As perhaps the most lauded of Victorian writers and a perennial classroom favorite, Dickens gives us a window into the past. His fiction and journalism capture the complexities of Victorian life, while continuing to resonate with meaning today.

In London in the Time of Dickens, you’ll get the unique opportunity to experience the British capital through the eyes of a literary master whose work is inextricably tied to the city and its rich history. Throughout 12 lectures taught by Professor Lillian Nayder of Bates College, you’ll tour the city of London in a time of rapid transformation through the life and work of Charles Dickens, uncovering the history of the metropolis, while also witnessing the everyday experiences of Londoners from all walks of life as Dickens represents them.

Crossing London’s Great Gulf

London in the 19th century was a city of contrasts. It was a bustling, diverse, and vibrant urban center that was a hub of culture and innovation. It was also a place of great suffering and starvation, of child labor, soot-filled skies, and rank smells that penetrated even the wealthiest sections of the city.

Dickens himself experienced life on both sides of the “great gulf” that separated rich from poor—His own life was a blueprint that informed rags-to-riches elements in his stories, from Oliver Twist to Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend. His early struggles left a deep impression on Dickens even after he had become a wealthy and successful literary celebrity, and he proved to be perpetually interested in the class divisions that shaped life in London.

The everyday experiences of working-class Londoners provided an inexhaustible source of literary material for a prolific writer looking to capture life on the page—and improve life beyond the bounds of fiction. Through the many beloved stories and characters of Dickens, Professor Nayder will give you a glimpse into:

• Law, Order, and (In)justice. Dickens often shows a great deal of sympathy for characters like the Artful Dodger who commit crimes out of necessity, and yet he also had a deep authoritarian streak—a common Victorian dichotomy. You’ll look at the emergence of the metropolitan police force, the “great age of prison building,” and the reform movements that sought to rehabilitate offenders as you consider the limits of London’s justice system.
• Idealized Gender Norms vs. Social Realities. Victorian ideals of gender promoted stark divisions between men and women and the expectations placed on each, and emphasized the separation of the domestic from the public sphere. A number of Dickens’s female characters reflect the more nuanced and realistic experiences of women—particularly working-class women—of the time.
• The Perils of Childhood. Many of Dickens’s most beloved characters are children. These young and vulnerable protagonists provide a lens through which Dickens captures how dangerous and bewildering life in Victorian London could be, especially for boys and girls who were often required to work to survive and had little power to change their circumstances.
• Urban Transformation. While London had been growing for centuries, the city saw a particularly sweeping and rapid series of changes in the Victorian period. With the increasing pollution of its major waterways and the problems created by gas and coal usage, the city's environmental degradation posed threats to life, health, and well-being of Londoners, which sanitary reformers and engineers did their best to resolve.

As a writer and social reformer, Dickens created stories that capture the imagination, while also opening the eyes of readers to the realities of urban life and the rapid transformations of Victorian London during the Industrial Revolution. Even today, the effects of technological innovation, urban growth, and social divisions and inequities raise many of the same questions that his novels interrogated over a century ago, and which give his works added importance.

London in Fact and Fiction

Dickens was a novelist who was deeply concerned about the lives of his fellow Londoners. He was also an entertainer. As Professor Nayder demonstrates in various contexts, Dickens used his comic genius and his knowledge of literary genres and English dialects to win over his readers, capture their interest, and present them with the genuine social issues that desperately needed their attention.

He not only featured characters in dire circumstances to highlight these important issues, but he also brilliantly captured the humor and absurdities of life.

As you’ll learn throughout this course, the imaginative project of Dickens—to revisit the past, capture the present, and anticipate the future—provides readers today with a rare opportunity to see London in an era that is both very different from our own and strangely familiar. The anxieties and hopes that preoccupied Dickens and his contemporaries have taken new forms yet remain with us in essential ways. Debates over class divisions, the preservation of history, gender norms, the value of labor and human life, among other issues, continue to challenge us today. And, like the inhabitants of Victorian London, we are caught up in rapid technological and social change and must decide how to best move into the future.

London in the Time of Dickens offers general readers and historians alike a one-of-a-kind window into a one-of-a-kind time and place. Join Professor Nayder on a literary tour of a city that sparked the imagination and shaped the life of a writer like no other.