TWO HUNDRED YEARS OF CHARLES DICKENS
Two Hundred Years of Charles Dickens will celebrate the writer’s life and work from the cradle to the grave with a series of walks, talks and visits in London, Portsmouth and Rochester. As well as touring the houses where Dickens (1812-1870) was born and died, we will dine or take tea in a handful of the inns that appear in his novels.
Nicholas Nickleby will come under scrutiny in Portsmouth and David Copperfield, Bleak House and Oliver Twist in the capital, where we will also visit the Dickens Museum in Doughty Street, one of the writer’s major residences and the headquarters of the Dickens Fellowship since 1925. Rochester – the “Cloisterham” of The Mystery of Edwin Drood – features extensively in Dickens’s corpus, including in The Pickwick Papers – and it was is in the village churchyard of Cooling that Pip met Magwitch in Great Expectations.
In addition to investigating the sites that inspired Dickens’s greatest novels, we will take the opportunity to re-examine the great social issues of the 19th century, from extreme poverty and child mortality to philanthropy.
Dickens and London exhibition:
At the Museum of London’s Dickens and London exhibition we will view the rarely-seen manuscripts of Bleak House and David Copperfield, written in the author’s own hand. Paintings, photographs, costumes and personal mementos will further illustrate Dickens’s life in the capital and offer clues to his creative genius.
We stay at the Ramada Farnham Hotel, near Farnham, with wonderful views of the Surrey Downs.
This tour will be led by Peter Clark, PhD, OBE, author of Dickens’s London, to be published in early 2012 to coincide with the bicentenary of Dickens’s birth.
Itinerary
Day 1Tour assembles 1345 at Ramada Farnham Hotel, near Farnham, for three nights. Portsmouth: Dickens Birthplace Museum, walking tour of sites associated with life of Dickens and Nicholas Nickleby. Evening lecture: Dickens and London.
Day 2London: Dickens walk (David Copperfield, Bleak House, Oliver Twist) including Trafalgar Square, Embankment, Wellington Street, Covent Garden, Lincoln’s Inn, Holborn. Lunch at the George Inn, Southwark. Afternoon: Southwark walk (Little Dorrit, David Copperfield) including Marshalsea, Lant Street, King’s Bench Prison, St George’s Obelisk. Evening lecture: Dickens and Kent.
Day 3Rochester (Mystery of Edwin Drood, Great Expectations, Pickwick Papers): coffee at Royal Victoria and Bull Hotel (where Mr Pickwick stayed) followed by Dickens walk: cathedral, castle, Eastgate House. Afternoon: Gad’s Hill Place (Dickens’s home) with lunch at the Sir John Falstaff followed by Cooling churchyard (where Pip met Magwitch in Great Expectations), tea at Leather Bottle, Cobham (Pickwick Papers). Evening talk: Dickens and Death.
Day 4London: drive along Holborn, passing several locations related to Dickens, Museum of London for Dickens and London exhibition, lunch at George and Vulture Inn (Pickwick Papers), Westminster Abbey (Dickens’s grave). Tour disperses 1530 in London, 1700 at hotel.
