Mapped
A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens
One night's haunting, walked across the City of London. Cornhill, the Royal Exchange and Bob Cratchit's Camden Town are named outright and still on the map; Scrooge's counting-house and Fezziwig's warehouse are unlocated interiors, pinned to the courts off Cornhill that tradition and Dickens's own clues point to. That split is exactly what the certainty labels are for.
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A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens
Between London and a Paris sliding into revolution, Dickens weaves the fates of the recalled prisoner Dr Manette, his daughter Lucie, the aristocrat Charles Darnay and the wasted lawyer Sydney Carton, toward a sacrifice at the guillotine. The novel maps two real cities: Tellson's Bank and the Old Bailey in London, and in Paris the wine-shop of Saint-Antoine, the stormed Bastille, and the Place de la Révolution where the blade falls.
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Bleak House
Charles Dickens
Around the endless Chancery suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Dickens draws a whole society, from the fog-bound law courts to the rotting slum of Tom-all-Alone's, from a Lincolnshire great house to the good house in Hertfordshire where Esther Summerson makes a home. The novel maps a real geography: the Court of Chancery and Lincoln's Inn, the slum whose fever spreads to rich and poor alike, and the country estates on which its secrets turn.
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David Copperfield
Charles Dickens
Dickens's most autobiographical novel follows David Copperfield from a Suffolk childhood through cruelty, child labour and hard-won fortune, across an England he renders with tender exactness. It maps a real country: the village of his birth, the Yarmouth beach where the Peggottys keep their upturned-boat home, the London warehouse of his degradation and the improvident Micawbers, and Canterbury and Dover, where his aunt Betsey Trotwood gives him a second chance.
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Great Expectations
Charles Dickens
Pip's road runs from the Kent marshes to London and back. Dickens lightly fictionalises the marsh village and "the town", but draws them from real ground: the churchyard at Cooling on the Hoo peninsula, and Rochester, whose Restoration House became Satis House. In London the places are named outright, Little Britain and Smithfield, Newgate, Barnard's Inn. The bbox spans the whole run, from the estuary marshes east of Rochester to Holborn.
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Oliver Twist
Charles Dickens
After an unnamed provincial workhouse, the book comes to London and stays in named ground: Saffron Hill and Field Lane, the real Clerkenwell rookery where Fagin keeps his den; Clerkenwell Green, where the Dodger picks Mr Brownlow's pocket; Pentonville, where Brownlow lives; Newgate, where Fagin is condemned; and Jacob's Island in Bermondsey, the notorious tidal slum Dickens's own footnote insisted was real, where Sikes dies. Most of these were cleared within Dickens's lifetime, which is what the historical map layer is for. The bbox runs from Pentonville down to the Bermondsey riverside.
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