Sunshine Recorder

Dickens’s Victorian London is a collection of 19th-century photographs which has been published to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’s birth.

1. A view of the Strand around 1890, taken from in front of St Mary le Strand. On the left is Somerset House, where Dickens’s father John worked as a clerk for the Navy Pay Office.

2. Lower Fore Street, a narrow cobblestoned street in Lambeth, pictured in 1865. This industrial area became very densely populated over the Victorian period; its inhabitants rose from 28,000 in 1801 to nearly 300,000 by the time this photograph was taken.

3. This picture shows St John’s Gate, the gateway to what was once the priory of the Knights of St John. By the 18th century, it housed the offices of the publishers of the Gentleman’s Magazine.