Please join the Santa Cruz Dickens Fellowship and the Santa Cruz Pickwick Club for our June Pickwick Club talk by author and historian Lee Jackson who will be discussing Dickens’s London.

Lee Jackson, author of Dickensland (Yale, 2023) will discuss the curious history of London’s Dickensian tourist destinations. Louisa May Alcott, visiting in 1866, was typical of the innumerable American tourists who would arrive in subsequent decades, enraptured by the dream-like quality of the Victorian metropolis seen through a Dickensian lens (‘I felt as if I’d got into a novel’). But did tourists truly encounter ‘Dickens’s London’ or merely a ‘Dickensland’ shaped by the demands of Dickens fandom (dubbed by Victorian newspapers ‘The Dickens Cult’) and canny heritage entrepreneurs?

Lee Jackson is an author and historian, creator of the popular online sourcebook of Victoriana ‘The Dictionary of Victorian London‘ and an academic advisor to the Charles Dickens Museum. His previous non-fiction books include Dirty Old London (Yale, 2014) and Palaces of Pleasure (Yale, 2019).

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to reach out at dpj@ucsc.edu