Victorian engraving of a wagon interior.

Charles Dickens was undoubtedly one of the most acute observers of Victorian working class life. Where many gentlemen of his era may have preferred to avert their gaze, Dickens sought to scrutinise and record.

The dramatic action in his novels is placed in meticulously constructed sets as accurate in the smallest detail as any constructed in Hollywood today, the description of Mrs Jarleys wagon in The Old Curiosity Shop is a case in point:

"...at the further end as to accommodate a sleeping-place, constructed after the fashion of a berth on board ship, which was shaded, like the windows, with fair white curtains... The other half served for a kitchen, and was fitted up with a stove whose small chimney passed through the roof. It also held a closet or larder, several chests, a great pitcher of water, and a few cooking-utensils and articles of crockery. These latter necessaries hung upon the walls, which in that portion of the establishment devoted to the lady of the caravan, were ornamented with such gayer and lighter decorations as a triangle and a couple of well-thumbed tambourines..."

Victorian engraving of a wagon on the road.

In Nicholas Nickelby he describes carefree Gypsy children playing in the open countryside and muses that if only the old slander that Gypsies stole babies was true, then every child who had to work in city factories could

"...know that the air and light are on them every day; to feel that they ARE children, and lead children's lives; that if their pillows be damp, it is with the dews of Heaven, and not with tears; ...that their lives are spent, from day to day, at least among the waving trees, and not in the midst of dreadful engines which make young children old before they know what childhood is..."

Also in this anthology of the many references Dickens made to Travellers in his books and articles are references to Richardson's Booth, Wombwell's Menagerie, circus, tramps and other Travellers.

Charles Dickens and Travellers by John Pateman published by R&TFHS

Have you read the book? What did you think of it? Email kent@bbc.co.uk

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