Realism in Dickens’s time was magical, for the city was a fairy-tale come to life, grim, exhilarating, and transformative. To describe this urban world was to create a new Bible, encompassing heaven and earth, and all that lies between, the keynote struck at the beginning of Bleak House:

Personal experience fed the literary work: when Dickens was born on 7 February 1812, London was a city of horse-drawn carts and carriages, entered through city gates like Charing Gate, Newgate, with its formidable prison, and Kennington Toll Gate. When Dickens died fifty-eight years later in 1870, the gates and city wall had been pulled down and built on, and London turned into a sprawling monumental city, transformed by the industrial revolution, especially the railroad and entrepreneurial capitalism as well as the British imperial venture, into the first world-city.