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Last week, I offered my annual Black Friday selection for lovers of British-themed books, Mavericks by Jenny Draper. Marg participated in a blog tour for Life Begins at the Cornish Cottage by Kim Nash. The story features a village pantomime, a Christmas tradition in Britain that I barely understand but am completely fascinated by.

After I had a good experience on a London Walks virtual tour last year, I signed up for another one this year.

Last year, I enjoyed the Christmas with Jane Austen Virtual London Tour and reviewed it in a blog post. That tour will be offered again this year on December 16, her 250th birthday!

This year, I registered for The London of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The text says that the price is £20, but when I registered they only charged £10. That resulted in a $13.18 charge on my credit card. For an interesting measure of how the dollar is doing against the pound, I paid 37 cents more for the same £10 tour charge than I did last year.

First edition frontispiece and title page (1843)

Our guide is known as Richard IV on the London Walks website. To the rest of the world, he is Richard Burnip, who is an actor and audiobook narrator as well as a guide. Listening to him for an hour is pure pleasure — especially when he reads or quotes passages from Dickens.

I think my favorite parts of the Dickens tour were the many and varied Victorian maps that kept us oriented in time and space. Modern photos helped us understand what these places look like now. There’s a surprising amount of Victorian London lurking among the high rises in the Financial District, if you know where to look. A Victorian drawing showed us how different that the skyline looked like back then — all church spires plus the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

After a brief explanation of why and when A Christmas Carol was conceived and written, we started our walk at Trinity Square near the Tower of London.

Many of the sights on the tour reminded us that the Victorians were surrounded by death. Churchyards dotted the map. They boasted fancy iron fences, sometimes topped by gruesome skulls, and carved resurrection stones depicting skeletons rising from coffins. The ghosts in A Christmas Carol were present in the Victorian landscape.

St. Olave’s Churchyard is one of the sites on this virtual tour
By Dirk Ingo Franke – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Bells are key elements of A Christmas Carol. Given my fascination with British change bell ringing, I was thrilled to encounter a plaque honoring Fabian Stedman, a key creator of this style of ringing. I knew his surname from a common ringing method called Stedman Doubles.

The Stedman plaque is at St. Andrew Undershaft Church, once the tallest building in London but now it’s tucked in between the Gherkin and a building site that is destined to contain the tallest building in the City.

Our guide pointed out that the architecture of Leadenhall Market is festive, no matter the season. The current version was built after Dickens’ death, but there has been a market here since the 14th century. In Victorian times, it was best known for poultry. This may have been where Bob Cratchit purchased the Christmas goose for his family.

Center of Leadenhall Market
By Diliff – File:Leadenhall Market In London – Feb 2006.jpg, CC BY 2.5

The walk ended at St. Peter Westcheap Churchyard near St. Paul’s Cathedral. Our guide made a convincing case that this is where the Ghost of Christmas Future showed Scrooge his grave.

If we were to take this tour in real life, around lunch or supper time, there were a couple of places to choose from.

• The Counting House is a historic pub and hotel that drips in Victorian atmosphere. Scrooge’s counting house would have been nearby in one of the numerous tiny alleys.
• The George & Vulture was mentioned by name in The Pickwick Papers and may be where Scrooge had his nightly bite of supper that perhaps included an underdone potato on the night of the events of A Christmas Carol.

This is a long post, but I left out many details. For a burst of London-themed Christmas spirit, I highly recommend booking one of the other tours this month — December 14, 24, and 28.