The Life of Charles Dickens 'In a miserable court at night: says Mrs Fields, we found a haggard old woman blowing at a kind of pipe made of an old ink-bottle.' 1869 - Dickens showed an American friend, Mr Fields, something of London and went to a chamber in Furnival's Inn, where the first page of Pickwick was written over 30 years before, only to find it close to the original of the scene of its opening chapter, the opium-eater's den. Illustration by Fred Barnard