Rambles in Dickens' Land

London streets become a map of remembered fiction in Robert Allbut's guide to places associated with Charles Dickens. Ten rambles connect city walks with excursions to Rochester, Gadshill, Canterbury, Dover and other destinations. The introduction explains how familiar characters can shape a reader's sense of an actual town, while passages from the novels help recover the scenes attached to particular buildings and roads.

Allbut combines directions with literary references, local history and attention to disputed identifications. A route through Whitehall and St. James's Park links landmarks to David Copperfield and Martin Chuzzlewit; a Kent excursion brings together Dickens family residences and settings recalled from several novels. The guide also records buildings being rebuilt or replaced in its own time. For readers interested in literary geography, it offers a record of how Dickens's imagined world was located within the changing streets and landscapes of late nineteenth-century England.