Christmas is coming and the geese are getting fat. The weather’s getting chilly and you’re going to need your hat!
Okay, enough of the festive rhymes.
Today our eagerly awaited Dickens Christmas walks have gone live and they will be available from Saturday 22nd December 2012.
When we celebrate Christmas today we owe an enormous debt to Charles Dickens who, more than any other figure in Victorian London, almost single-handedly laid down the blueprint for how the festive season should be kept.
A Christmas Carol, one of his most famous works, really did show the Victorian public how they should celebrate the festive period and how they should think of the poor and the dispossessed at this time of year.
Our special Dickens Christmas Walks cover a wide range of areas and Dickensian themes.
The first walk, on 22nd December, will follow in Dickens’s footsteps through the alleyways and passageways that snake off Fleet Street. This is a fantastic part of London and some of the old courtyards we visit are still as they were in Dickens day.
This will be followed on 23rd December by a Ghosts of Dickens Past walk. Ghosts in this respect mean the childhood experiences that traumatised the young Dickens and to which he would later return in his fiction, most notably in Little Dorrit. But the walk also focusses on what the poverty of the area which, in some ways, was far worse than that of Spitalfields and Whitechapel which we cover on the Jack the Ripper Tour.
One of the nice things about the Ghosts of Dickens Past Tour is that it features two absolute gems. A secret Victorian Garden set up to provide the poor with some respite from the polluted streets in which they lived, and an ancient burial ground that was only recently re-discovered.
So, why not get festive this Christmas and take a walk back in time to stroll the streets of Victorian London as you follow in the footsteps of England’s greatest novelist?
Click Here for full details of the upcoming festive walks.