London in the nineteenth century is almost impossible to summarise, though many contemporary writers tried, including Charles Dickens's son Charles Jr in Dickens's Dictionary of London, an alphabetical listing of everything from tourist sites to bus timetables. In fact, the London scene was a common genre, both visually, in illustrations, and in novels and periodicals throughout the century. Dickens proved to be the most influential of all. In 1876, six years after his death, a popular writer, Thomas Edgar Pemberton, published Dickens's London: or, London in the Works of Charles Dickens, the first of many books to codify nineteenth-century London as particularly Dickens's London.

At the beginning of the century London was still a collection of neighbourhoods or parishes that, until the Metropolitan Board of Works was established in 1855, had their own government, welfare system (the hated Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 that established local workhouses for the indigent is the subject of the first quarter of Oliver Twist), refuse removal, street cleaning and paving, and lighting. There was also local responsibility for public order, though in 1829 the home secretary Sir Robert Peel established the Metropolitan Police, who have ever since borne his nickname ‘bobbies’.