This is London's Charing Cross Station, scene of comic fisticuffs for Mr Pickwick who has upset a cab driver by asking too many questions and, in the interest of The Pickwick Club, written down the answers in a notebook. Just down Villiers Street, to the left of the station, was the ‘miserable pub, the Lion or the Lion and something’ where as a young boy working in the Blacking Warehouse, Dickens would buy ‘a fourpenny plate of red beef’ if he was feeling flush.

Credit : STEPHEN BROWNING/HALSGROVE/REX