What is Dickens trying to describe? More often than not, it is London. He boasted in 1866 to know the city ‘better than any one other man of all its millions’. Certainly he began his complex relationship with the place early. John Forster started his biography with an account of how as a child being

For many readers today, Dickens is nineteenth-century London and vice versa. Television and film directors spend immense amounts of money recreating authentic scenes of dilapidation and mud on the supposition that his fiction provides a window onto the nineteenth century and, above all, the street life of the city. The name ‘Charles Dickens’, of course, is part and parcel of the heritage London still sells to tourists today. A series of guidebooks even exists – Walks in Dickens's London – devoted to particular parts of the city and their relationship to the novels and the life of their author (a distinction not always very clearly maintained).