Dickensian London: You simply must go

February, Month of Glory, is all about birthdays. I know people with birthdays on eighteen of February’s twenty-eight days, including a cousin, three grandparents, my two favourite childhood dolls, my very good self, and a boy from my primary school class who always used to wet himself and then cry.

Today is – or would have been – Charles Dickens’s birthday. (He’s not the ‘person I know’ for 7 Feb, by the way – there was also a girl at my secondary school with luminous yellow hair.) Charles Dickens is one of the most marvellous people who ever lived, and No.1 on my list of Historical People I’d Like to Have a Pint With. He was born in Portsmouth on this day in 1812, the second of eight children of the financially useless John Dickens, who ended up in Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison, taking the whole family with him. Twelve-year-old Charles had to leave school and support the family, and ended up working at a blacking factory underneath what is now Charing Cross Station, essentially sticking labels onto jars of boot polish.

‘A crazy, tumbledown old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats… The sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise visibly up before me, as if I were there again.’

We went for a walk around Dickensian London last week – it was like going back in time, fucking brilliant – and saw the steps down to the river where young Dickens might have, I don’t know, washed his glue brushes or drowned some rats. The river was higher in those days, and came up to the grim side passage of Gordon’s Wine Bar that is, I can attest, ‘literally overrun with rats’. Just off the Strand, we peered through the gates of a Roman Bath I never knew existed, and where Dickens suffered ‘many a cold plunge’.

Just off Lincoln’s Inn Fields, you can see yer actual Old Curiosity Shop, which – needless to remark – was not thus named in Dickens’s day, but it was a bookbinder’s shop that the good man himself used to frequent. We didn’t go there, however – we made a beeline for one of Dickens’s favourite pubs, Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street. The pub was built in 1538 and rebuilt after the Great Fire of London, and Dickens used to sit by the fire in the gloomy, smoky little room to the right of the front door. I don’t think he would have drunk pints of Sam Smith’s Pure Brewed Lager, but that is what we did, imagining all the while that the large blonde tourist at his favourite table was a bearded Victorian man saying terribly witty things.