DICKENS CHURCH

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 690, 15 June 1929, Page 27

DICKENS CHURCH

DAMAGE BY TRAFFIC APPEAL FOR FUNDS The Church of St. George the ; Martyr, more familiarly known as ■ Little Dorrit’s Church, is, according to j dispatches from London, in danger of j collapse. City traffic passing the his- i toric church has grown heavier of i late years and the vibration has loos- ■ ened the old pillars. The Bishop of , Southwark has appealed for £5,000 to repair some of the damage and to make the building safe for communicants and visitors. Little Dorrit’s Church stands in the borough of Southwark, a borough connected with the city of London by Blackfriars, Southwark and London Bridges. In the midst of riverside wharves and glassware manufactories, it serves one of the poorer and more congested parts of the great city. The church stands on foundation stones r laid by the Abbots of Bermondsey | when, about 1122, they built there a convent. Since that time the ground has been used continuously for religi- ! ous buildings, according to a volume !on ecclesiastical architecture pubj lished in London in 191 S and containing an engraving of the present church, completed about 1736. The church is of brick with stone window frames and balustrades. The centre of the west end is supported by lonic pillars with circular pediment forming the principal entrance. Above, a columned tower supports the thin, high steeple. Although among the smaller London churches, the interior of St. George's of Southwark appears spacious, with its galleries, fine organ and high painted ceiling. The j original ceiling was replaced In 1897 ! by one designed by Basil Champneys, ! which represents cherubim singing { the Te Deum, while the frieze coni tains the arms of the various city comI panies. This, today, is the church around j which Little Dorrit played so long j ago, the quaint figure called by Charles [ Dickens “the Child of the Marshalsea.” In the preface of his novel, "Little Dorrit,” Dickens tells of a journey he made to this district to see how much of old Marshalsea Prison, the birthplace of Little Dorrit, still remained. “I, myself, did not know until I was approaching the end of this story (“Little Dorrit”) when I went to look. I found the outer front courtyard . . . metamorphosed into a butter shop; wandering down a certain adjacent ‘Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey* I came to Marshalsea Prison; the houses in which I recognised, not only as the great blocks of the former prison, but as preserving the rooms that arose in my mind’s eye when I became Little Dorrit’s biographer.” And it was in the district about the Church of St. George the Martyr that Little Dorrit grew up. She sat in the old churchyard among sagging tombstones and wended her happy way into devious back alleys and waterfront lanes. “Whosoever goes into Marshalsea Place, turning out of Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey, will find his feet on the very paving stones of the extinct Marshalsea jail (a few doors short of the Church of St. George),” wrote Dickens; “I pointed to the window of the room where Little Dorrit was born and where her father lived so long.” And in the novel that today leads Dickens’s lovers to Saint George’s, he wrote:

“This is the history of Little Dorrit; turning at the end of London Bridge, recrossing it, going back again, passing on to Saint George’s Church, turning back suddenly once more, and flitting in at the open gate and little courtyard of the Marshalsea.”