Lant Street: The Boy Dickens's Paradise
Why is it significant?
Walk slowly along Lant Street, a modest run of brick terraces with a primary school named after Charles Dickens on one side, and try to strip away two centuries. Picture a back attic in the house of a man who worked for the debtors' court, with a sloping ceiling and a window over a timber yard.
Key Facts
| Place | Lant Street: The Boy Dickens's Paradise |
|---|---|
| Address | Lant Street, London SE1 1QP, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.50170, -0.09700 |
| Part of Walk | Shakespeare's Southwark: Bankside, the Globe and Tate Modern in London |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk slowly along Lant Street, a modest run of brick terraces with a primary school named after Charles Dickens on one side, and try to strip away two centuries. Picture a back attic in the house of a man who worked for the debtors' court, with a sloping ceiling and a window over a timber yard. In 1824 that attic was home to a twelve-year-old boy, entirely on his own.
Before Lant Street, young Charles had lodged in Camden Town, miles from his family, and walked into town every day. When a room was found for him here, close enough to share breakfast with his parents in the prison, he later told John Forster that he thought it was a paradise. That one word tells you everything about how lonely the months before it had been.
Dickens never forgot the street. A dozen years later, in The Pickwick Papers, he lodged the cheerfully disreputable medical student Bob Sawyer in Lant Street, and wrote, with a perfectly straight face, that a kind of repose hung over it which shed a gentle melancholy upon the soul. It is a private joke, aimed at a place only he knew the real meaning of.
Southwark kept turning up in his books. His father is usually seen as the model for Mr Micawber in David Copperfield, who also lands in a debtors' prison, the King's Bench, which stood a short walk south of here. Again and again Dickens wrote about prisons, debt and abandoned children, and again and again the roots lead back to these few streets and to the months when he was a working boy among the debtors of the Borough.
The family's troubles ended suddenly: a legacy arrived, John Dickens was released, and before long Charles was back at school. But the boy from Lant Street became the man who changed how Britain looked at its poor. Now head north to Union Street and the corner of Redcross Way, where a pair of iron gates is covered in ribbons.