London u fokusu / london in Focus
to the consciousness of the reader, and which remain there. Dickens’ second meeting with the city in which he was to spend the rest of his life, early in the autumn of 1822, was much more cheerful, at least initially – this was largely because Camden Town, where his family took up residence, was then a rural settlement on the city’s pe- riphery, full of greenery, which remind- ed the ten-year-old boy of the provin- cial region from which he originated. At the same time, however, the landscape of his new environment was also paint- ed with the gloomy colours of his joyless early memories. The convincing nature of his artistic images of the slums of London would be influenced in no small part by the fact that he would himself spend time living in the world of the degraded and slighted: he was ten when debts saw his father sent to prison and he was forced to spend sev- eral months in Dickensian conditions, in the company of other boys who, like him, were not the darlings of fate, working in a factory. From then on he would carry in his lungs the infective breath of the residue of the industrial revolution, and in his heart deep empathy for its count- less innocent victims. Dickens, however, loved London with the kind of uncondi- tional love that forgives everything. For him, that city was a wondrous gallery of live images from which he drew bound- less energy and inspiration for his writ- ing; a place that contained within itself all sorts of extremes and contradictions – in short, in the words of the narrator of the novel Nicholas Nickleby, “a thou- sand worlds”. London during the time of the reign of Queen Victoria really was not only the world’s largest city, but also, in many ways, the world’s most exciting city. The popu- lation grew dizzying from a million at the start of the nineteenth century to nearly five million at its end. That rapid develop- ment was accompanied during the time of Dickens’s childhood and early youth by the no less dramatic social stratifica- tion of the population. Houses of the in- decently rich and offensively impover- ished often stood side by side, and their residents shared the same lush life of the congested city streets. They were equally dirtied by both, but mostly by the hors- es, which pulled thousands of carriages through those streets. Penetrating through the din of the street were the voices of street traders, offering the widest variety of goods, the songs of drunks and the cries of beggars.
Pickpockets, prostitutes and robbers were somewhat quieter, but equally important to the colourful social life of the London of the first half of the nineteenth centu- ry – especially at night, under the subtle light of gas lanterns. This image of the city would be left unfinished if we did not add the smell, which was not overly pleas- ant but was really quite special, created largely by a blending of the operations of an imperfect sewage system and the of- ten problematic hygiene habits of its us- ers. Falling on all of this unendingly was that grey snow from the soot of house- hold fireplaces, and that black snow, from the new manufacturing plants. At some point Charles Dickens himself emerged from this soot, resolved to immortalise his time and his city in works of world- class, timeless values. And that city had already changed radically during the course of his short life. Carriages were replaced by omnibus- es (albeit still horse-drawn), then the Lon- don Underground railway; the streets be- came less congested, not only because they became increasingly wider, but al- so because London slowly moved to the suburbs, while some of its, until recent- ly typical, inhabitants were consigned to history, and, of course, to Dickens’ imag- ination and then, unchangeably, to the imaginations of his readers. The London streets of Bill Sykes and Ebenezer Scrooge, Fagin and Little Dorrit, Philip Pirrip and David Copperfield have disappeared, because the city that they knew and belonged to has also disap- peared. In that city, in the London shroud- ed in secrets and immersed in frightening, but infinitely touching poetics, remained their creator, Charles Dickens. And the fog: “Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the wa- terside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights... Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hang- ing in the misty clouds.” For Dickens, London was not merely the city about which he wrote like nobody before or since, nor a mere background and stage for the strange experiences of the heroes of his works: within him, London is a living being, which rejoic- es and suffers, rises and falters, suffers and triumphs along with those who live in it… and in the novels of Charles Dick- ens, forever.
London je u Dikensovim romanima živo biće, koje se raduje i pati, uzdiže se i posrće, strada i trijumfuje s onima koji žive u njemu
London in Dickens’ novels is a living being, which rejoices and suffers, rises and falters, struggles and triumphs along with those who live in it
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