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Dickens
and Camden
Town
Railways in London
by Gustave Doré from London: A Pilgrimage (1872)
In Dombey and Son, Dickens described the
building of the railway line that cut through Camden Town near Staggs’s
Gardens, the home of Paul Dombey's wet nurse.
'The
first shock of a great earthquake had, just at that period, rent the whole
neighbourhood to its centre. Traces
of its course were visible on every side.
Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep
pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown
up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of
wood. Here, a chaos of carts,
overthrown and jumbled together, lay topsy-turvy at the bottom of a steep
unnatural hill. … Everywhere
were bridges that led nowhere; thoroughfares that were wholly impassable.
... In short, the yet unfinished and unopened Railroad was in progress; and,
from the very core of all this dire disorder, trailed smoothly away, upon
its mighty course of civilisation and improvement.’
But
six years later, when the dying Paul wanted to see his old nurse, ‘there was no such
place as Staggs’s Gardens. It
had vanished from the earth. Where
the old rotten summer-houses once had stood, palaces now reared their heads,
and granite columns of gigantic girth opened a vista to the railway world
beyond. The miserable waste
ground, where the refuse-matter had been heaped of yore, was swallowed up
and gone. The old by-streets now swarmed with passengers and vehicles
of every kind; the new streets that had stopped disheartened in the mud and
waggon-ruts, formed towns within themselves.
… Bridges that had led
to nothing, led to villas, gardens, churches, healthy public walks.’
| Explore Gloucester Crescent, where Dickens'
wife Catherine lived when he separated from her, after 22 years of marriage and the birth of ten children. He had fallen for Ellen Ternan, a young actress. Although
their eldest son Charley opted to live with his mother Catherine
saw very little of her other children after the separation and was not allowed to attend the wedding of her daughter Kate in 1860.
The Doré engraving illustrates the sex
stereotyping that underpinned Dickens’ treatment of
his wife. Pretty young women were idealized, although they were
confined to the domestic roles of caring for their families and the
semi-domestic philanthropic role of caring for the weak and helpless more
generally. After the separation Dickens could not bear any of his friends to express anything other than whole
hearted sympathy with his complaints against Catherine.
He ceased his
long liaison with his illustrator because Hablot Browne (Phiz)
illustrated a magazine published by a friend he had quarreled with over
the separation. See Dickens
and Women for more about the stereotyped Victorian attitudes to women
illustrated by Doré. |
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Women in a children’s hospital
by Gustave Doré from London: A Pilgrimage (1872)
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