Metropolitan Home Online

Metropolitan Home Online

Metropolitan Home Online

Their area of operations around St. Paul’s Cathedral near the old City of London seethed with trouble of all kinds - robbery, pickpocketing, murder, assault, prostitution, riot and a great deal more. Tens of thousands of Londoners, it was thought, lived by crime in run-down, overcrowded, diseased-ridden homes sited in filthy streets. There was little, if anything else for them.

London Criminals in the Novels of Charles Dickens

This was precisely the type of environment that offered opportunities, and plenty of them, for the entire gamut of violence and misdemeanor as it was all too well known in the extreme poverty, despair and squalor shared by its inhabitants.

If all this sounds like a scene from a novel by the 19th century British novelist Charles Dickens, it is hardly surprising. London as Dickens knew it, together with its seamier characters, reached his pages, not from his imagination, but from his observations. Among these were Dickens’ fascination with, and close study of, the Metropolitan Police and the problems that confronted them.


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