London was on the threshold of a period of enormous expanson and change: it was the coming of the great Age. But to the boy Dickens, forcibly separated from his family, it was a terrifying place. Alone he'd walk the slum-ridden, shabby, depressed and dirty streets, stand and stare at busy street corners, peep down dark, dismal courts, and feed his insatiable curiousity with 'wild visions' that were in monstrous empathy with his deep sense of despair. More than 100 years later the sights and sounds of that city, its colour and suffering reach out to us through his writings and some of the earliest surviving pictures of his day. Dickens' London is London through Dickens' eyes, a uniques interpretation of the spirit of Victorian London in the company of the master medium of the Age and under the guidance of Peter Ackroyd; both men among the greatest place poets in the English language.