“What the hell is a Dickens date?” my friend asked. Her look was a mixture of amusement and horror when I told her that, in the spirit of Do Something, I had signed up to the activity-based dating site doingsomething.co.uk – with that name, surely it would be the perfect fit. My activity was a Dickensian walking tour of London. I admit it isn’t a typical first date, but my recent experiences of awkward evenings drinking overpriced wine were not working out for me. I wanted to meet someone who could not only hold good conversation but would be happy to trawl around the city listening to facts about 19th-century London. A Dickens tour was not just an interesting diversion, it was a screening process.
The founder of Doingsomething.co.uk, Matt Janes, explained later that this was precisely the reason he’d set up the site three years ago. He wanted dating to move away from the obligatory pub setting, where couples nervously drink too much and fire questions back and forth like a job interview. He liked the idea of dating where the onus is on having a nice time, rather than desperately searching for “the one”.
My friends thought I was mad, but I thought of Dickens: “Happiness is a gift and the trick is not to expect it,” he wrote in Nicholas Nickleby. Low expectations and a niche remit; I had nothing to lose. On the site, alongside a single picture of myself, I added: “I have always wanted to do a Dickensian tour of London. Must include wine.”
I was pleasantly surprised and mildly bemused by how many people were up for it. Eventually I responded to a guy called Luke. With just one picture and a previous date suggestion involving free theatre, I persuaded myself he was like me; fearful of giving too much away on a dating profile, loves a bit of Dickensian drama. We arranged to meet.
Waiting in the Dickens Museum shop where the tour began, I saw Luke walk in. He was tall with lots of brown hair, a beard and a kind face. I couldn’t help thinking my mother would approve (a thought later confirmed when he said he worked at a local council and volunteered at homeless shelters).
He told me he had read two Dickens novels, was new to London and wanted to get to know the city better. He was also as nervous as I was: “We should have brought hip flasks,” he half-joked.
Our guide Mark, a couple from Australia and a lone French girl who had read nearly all of Dickens’ works were unlikely companions, but they added a charm to the evening. In a way I hadn’t predicted, the tour was an excellent remedy for first-date nerves.Our guide kicked off the conversation, others asked questions, and there was always interesting subject matter at hand.
In between discovering where Dickens’ first office was, or where he wrote A Christmas Carol, Luke and I began to chat. We dropped back from the group and I learned about Luke’s job; as our guide told anecdotes about David Copperfield, I told Luke where I was when I first read it and about my many trips to Kent since. Somehow, the story of Dickens was helping us to tell our own stories to each other.
We had a pretty impressive backdrop too. The courts of Gray’s Inn Yard, which I’d passed a million times but never bothered to explore, looked, by dusk, like a film set.
After two hours of walking, we finished up in a pub near St Paul’s cathedral. Our nerves had long gone, Luke was keen to read more Dickens and I had indulged in stories about one of my favourite writers. At last orders we were still talking (and drinking), and numbers were exchanged. We haven’t scheduled another date, but I can confidently say we had the best of times.
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