In memory of Dickens…

Some of my inherited copies of Dickens

Born in Portsmouth on February 7th, 1812, Charles John Huffam Dickens became one of our greatest writers.  Working first as a freelance reporter, in 1864 he founded the Journalists' Charity - an organisation that still exists today.  An essayist and inveterate letter-writer on the rights and education of children, he was also a travel writer.  Oh, and he wrote a stack of novels and short stories too!  He died 150 years ago on this day in 1870 at his house in Gads Hill, Higham in Kent.

I've found that Dickens is a bit like marmite: you either love him or hate him.  As you can probably guess I fall into the former category.  I find Dickens' plots intriguing, his characters fascinating and his setting - mostly London - a window on time and history.  As a youngster, I would read his books - very gradually, they are all rather long - and find myself completely lost in the world on the page.  He has an incredible knack for capturing your imagination from the very outset.  But a lot of his stories originally appeared in serial form, so it's perhaps not surprising that he became a master of the 'cliff-hanger' device that so many writers still use today.

It was Dickens' Pictures from Italy that got me interested in France.  Hmm, yes at first glance it appears there is a disconnect there - but it's true.  When I was a very bookish 14-year-old, my father gave me his copy of Pictures from Italy to read a couple of months before I embarked on a school trip that took me, and the other girls in my class, on a journey by train across France and on to Venice and Rome.  If you follow this blog regularly, you'll know that I've been revisiting France ever since.

In Pictures from Italy, Dickens and his entire family leave their hotel on the rue Rivoli in Paris to travel by coach to Milan.  Rue Rivoli is one of the most famous streets in Paris.  Running through the 1st and 4th arrondissements this street now contains some of the world's most prestigious shops.  Named after Napoleon's victory at Rivoli in January 1797, you would have thought Dickens might have made mention of this - it is 1844 when Dickens is making this trip.  He merely remarks, that for a Sunday, the 'wine-shops (every second house)' were doing a roaring trade and that the people in the streets were so numerous that he could find nothing that 'denoted' the day as a 'day of rest.'   He clearly wasn't impressed!

The Seine, Paris

His route takes him from Paris to Sens, through Avallon and onto Chalons.   In 1844 this would have been one of the routes impériales designated by Napoleon in 1811.  On a modern map that is likely to have been the RN6 - a route through France I've taken myself on many occasions.  Dickens describes his journey - three days in a coach - as moving from 'a dreary plain' to an 'interminable avenue' and round and round again.  I do seriously have to disagree with him on that point.

His journey takes him on from Chalons to Lyons.  He describes the city of Lyons as 'a whole town that has tumbled, anyhow, out of the sky.'  Well, perhaps in 1844, that was how the city looked.  Not to my more modern eyes.  Dickens then completely dismisses the cathedral and he gives the astronomical clock inside, a scathing, but detailed description.  This can only be the 9-metre tall astrolabe that dates from 1661.

As a timepiece, I think it's incredible.  Regrettably, the clock is no longer working, so Dickens has the advantage.  But I do have to wonder why he had to be so dismissive.  Even in 1844, a timepiece of that age, that quality of craftsmanship, must have been of note.  I guess there's no accounting for taste!

From Lyons (the N6 becomes the N7 south of the city) Dickens moves through the Alps, the foothills of which he describes as 'great sullen hills', onto Valence and Avignon.  This old papal city receives more favourable comment than Lyons.  From Avignon, he travels to Marseille via Aix-en-Provence (on a modern map that would be via the N8) to the coast..

Dickens dubs Marseille as a 'dirty and disagreeable place'.  He notes that the streets are full

The modern metropolis that is Marseille

of 'foreign sailors of all nations.'  That is still true today. Marseille is such a cosmopolitan city that you can eat in any one of a hundred different languages.  Dickens tempers his dislike of the place by adding that the view 'from the fortified heights' - perhaps the ancient fort that previously stood where the basilica Notre Dame-de-la-Garde now stands - is of the Mediterranean and the islands and that it is 'most delightful.'  And on that point I can most heartily agree!

You can read more about my visits to the modern city of Marseille Here