172 KNOWING DICKENS
the Morning Chronicle. As Forster writes of this London, “Its interior hidden
life becomes familiar as its commonest outward forms, and we discover that
we hardly knew anything of the places that we supposed we knew the best”
(Forster 123).
Although Dickens’s knowing voice gives the impression of vastness and
complexity, the London most central to his imagination is not terribly large.
Apart from the Limehouse area, it comprises perhaps three to four square
miles reaching in a southeasterly band from Camden Town to the City, and
across the river into Southwark—the areas north and south of the Thames
between the Westminster and London bridges. This, of course, is the terri-
tory marked out by Dickens’s childhood years; the autobiographical fragment
details the walking routes of the twelve-year-old boy even more carefully than
the novels mark out the paths of their characters. From North Gower Street,
where his mother tried and failed to set up a school, to the warehouse at the
Hungerford Stairs on the river; from his Chatham lodgings down Tottenham
Court Road and St. Martin’s Road through Covent Garden to Warren’s, and
then across the Blackfriars Bridge into “the Borough” where the Marshalsea,
and later the child’s Lant Street attic room, stood. The areas near the London
Bridge, where he used to wait for the Marshalsea gates to open. The coffee-
houses he frequented on Maiden Lane and St. Martin’s Lane; the new War-
ren’s warehouse nearby on Chandos Street; the Adelphi arches, equally close
at hand, where he used to hang about alone during the dinner break.
Dickens never really left this central area of London: his home at Devon-
shire Terrace near the southeast corner of Regent’s Park was as far west as he
went for his years of respectability. His next residence, Tavistock House, was
not far from Gower Street or the Doughty Street house where the Dickens
family had spent two early years. His characters live in the same region.
Mr. Dombey’s house, on a “dreadfully genteel street between Portland-place
and Bryanstone-square” (DS 3) is not far from Devonshire Terrace; Ralph
Nickelby’s house in Golden Square, which “is not exactly in anybody’s way
to or from anywhere,” could easily be right on the way from the river to
Hanover Square, where Dickens picked up his sister Fanny on Sunday morn-
ings to visit the family in prison (NN 2). The house in the East End where
Ralph Nickleby sends Mrs. Nickleby and Kate seems to be in approximately
the same place off Lower Thames Street as the dismal Clennam house to
which Arthur returns, walking from his lodging in Ludgate Hill past St. Paul’s
and “down, at a long angle, almost to the water’s edge” (LD 1.3). It is not
the same place as Warren’s, which is further upriver off the Strand, but it is
endowed with memories of decrepitude that belong to Warren’s. Rather like
the topography of Bleak House, with so many different households crowded