Newgate Prison beam, London, England, ca. 1780

1780-06

The demolition of London’s notorious Newgate Prison might have passed without notice had it not been for the work of Charles Dickens. As architecturally impressive as it was bleak, Newgate’s high-walled squalor appeared in Dickens’s earliest reporting on London’s social conditions, collected in Sketches by “Boz” (1836), and as a setting in his novels—notably, Oliver Twist (1838) and Barnaby Rudge (1841). The popularity of Dickens’s works on both sides of the Atlantic led readers to seek out the places described in his books. After his death in 1870, a flood of transatlantic tourists made their way to “disappearing Dickensland,” as one traveler described the vanishing London sites.