Retitled 'City of London Churches' in collected editions of the series
In his notes to The Uncommercial Traveller, ed. and introd Charles Dickens Jnr (Macmillan, 1925) (written in 1895) Charles Dickens Junior records having 'vivid recollections of some of the churches described in this paper, having on more than one occasion accompanied my father, when I was a boy, on Sunday expeditions from Devonshire Terrace into the City' (p. xx). As the Dickens household left their house at 1 Devonshire Terrace in November 1851, at least some of the 'expeditions' on which Dickens bases this paper clearly belong to the late 1840s or early 1850s. The sketch given in Dombey & Son of the church where Walter Gay and Florence Dombey marry (No. 18 [February 1848]; Ch. 56) is clearly the forerunner of the paper.
Read more...