Dickens: The Ultimate Map
3rd September 2024
A few years back, for a laugh, I read every single Dickens novel. All 15 of them. One after another. And then I read his five Christmas Books, followed by the collection of his early short fiction and non-fiction known as Sketches by Boz. I read well over 4 million words of Dickens which, to put it into absurd solipsistic context, is like reading this article 1,700 times, in quantity if not quality. It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.
Because I’m me, I didn’t just read these books. I also made notes about locations. Specifically, I jotted down every single time a London location was mentioned, across all 21 books. If anyone wants to see it, I have a 714-row spreadsheet listing out every named place, and the books in which each one appears.
Spreadsheets are crap for editorial purposes, though, so a map HAD to be made. I started off plotting all the points on a Google Map. This worked to some extent, but was a bit glitchy, and not particularly easy on the eye. So, that’s where this article comes in. I’ve started from scratch with the data and redrawn Dickens’s geo-literary output — his geobibliome, as I’m pompously calling it — as a proper map.
How does a ‘proper map’ differ from a ‘just plain map’? Got me