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Dickens & Shakespeare Fact File

Dickens first came to know Southwark in the traumatic days of his childhood when his father, John, was incarcerated for debt in the Marshalsea Prison. He was left alone and unhappy in lodgings in Camden Town, but after pleading with his father, he was found new lodgings in Lant Street, close to the prison. There is no doubt that this period of his childhood affected his later life profoundly, both personally and professionally. References to debt and debtors prisons crop up time and again in his novels, most notably in Little Dorrit (‘The child of the Marshalsea’), and in David Copperfield, where John Dickens appears as Mr Micawber, and Charles’s memories of the Marshalsea are transferred to the nearby King’s Bench Prison.

Southwark was an area that was undergoing aggressive development by speculators in Shakespeare’s day. Crowded tenements were going up as fast as they could build them. Houses were being divided up into apartments and gardens were rapidly disappearing beneath building extensions. The streets and alleys were teeming with life (a large proportion of it parasitic in one form or another).

The area was also home to industries like tanneries and glass works, and the usual variety of interesting odors and pollution that accompany such processes.
The population explosion in turn attracted the Theatre to the area. Southwark became the home of the Globe, The Rose and The Swan; this new theatreland was, just like Shoreditch, just outside the limits (and jurisdiction) of the city. Surrounding the theatres were more than 300 inns and alehouses where guests could eat, drink, gamble and sleep the night away. There were also other fine sources of entertainment, for example bowling, the more questionable spectator sport of bear-baiting and the morally dubious interactive entertainments of the brothels.

Many of Shakespeare's great tavern scenes and the characters that inhabit them were created during his stay in Southwark.

Start: Monument Station (Circle and District Underground lines).
Finish: Borough Station (Northern Underground line).
Length: 2 miles (3.2km).
Duration: 2 1/4 hours.
Best of times: Daytime.
Worst of times: Evenings.

How to Book >
Duration: approximately 1 hour 45 minutes – 2 hours
Meeting Point: Barbican Underground

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