Charles Dickens’s London Through History, Literature, and Film

A vibrant multi-class, multi-racial, and multi-ethnic jigsaw puzzle, nineteenth-century London was a capital city, the center of a vast empire, the largest city on the planet, and a place of both danger and opportunity. Charles Dickens called London his "magic lantern:" he used a series of lenses to project the lives of the metropolis and its inhabitants onto the page. Using an interdisciplinary approach, students examine London through the writings of Dickens (novels, short stories, journalism, and letters focused on London), recent historical scholarship, and modern film and television adaptations of Dickens's novels. Students analyze Dickens's London through a series of analytical such as urbanization, industrialization, theater and leisure, crime and punishment, class, gender, sexuality, and race and ethnicity.