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From St. Paul’s it’s about a 15-minute stroll to London Bridge, which spans the Thames River. In Dickens’ Great Expectations, Pip crossed the bridge in great despair after learning that Estella was to be married to Drummle. In Oliver Twist, Nancy met with Mr. Brownlow on the bridge to conspire for Oliver’s safety. Of course, if you want to stand on the actual bridge from the 1830s, you’ll have to go to Lake Havasu City, Ariz., where it was relocated, piece by piece, more than 40 years ago. The current London Bridge dates back to ye olde 1973.
Finish up your tour by crossing the bridge to the George Inn, which Dickens visited when it was a coffee house and mentions in Little Dorrit. This building, the last remaining galleried coaching inn in London, is a replacement, too, built after a fire destroyed the previous inn. But in this case the “new” building was put up in 1676.
THE FINAL CHAPTER
The Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey memorializes many of British literature’s greatest names.
It’s a tradition that started out slowly. Geoffrey Chaucer was buried in the abbey when he died in 1400 because he had been Clerk of Works to the palace of Westminster, not because of his Canterbury Tales. But more than 150 years later, a bigger monument was erected to honor Chaucer, and in 1599, the poet and author Edmund Spenser was buried nearby.
Other writers buried here include poets John Dryden, Lord Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, and authors Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Hardy. A number of other writers are buried elsewhere but commemorated at Poets’ Corner including John Milton, Percy Bysshe Shelley, T.S. Eliot, Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters.
Some writers had a tougher time than others making it into the corner. Shakespeare was buried at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1616, but didn’t get a monument until 1740. And the poet Lord Byron, a scandalous figure of his time, died in 1824 but didn’t get a memorial until the Swinging Sixties — 1969 to be precise.
Two of the graves are a fitting end to your literary tour. Johnson, who died in 1784 at age 75, is buried here, his grave marked by a plaque and a bust. And Dickens’ grave is also here, marked, at his instructions, only by a simple plaque inscribed with his name and the dates of his birth and death, Feb. 7, 1812, and June 9, 1870.
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