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| 48 Doughty St |
‘Colour in Oliver’ says a leaflet for children I took away
from the Charles Dickens Museum at 48 Doughty Street, near Russell Square in
central London. On the top floor of the museum is a cartoon by Cold War Steve doing
just that, showing Boris Johnson as fat Mr Bumble saying ‘no’ to Oliver, with Home
Secretary Priti Patel grinning smugly behind.
Dickens moved into the house in 1837 as a journalist, along
with his wife Catherine and son Charlie, and moved out two years later having
finished The Pickwick Papers, Nicholas
Nickleby and the hugely popular Oliver Twist, well on the way to
making his name.
Inside the house
Initially I was sceptical about visiting the house since I
had read that Dickens’s furniture from Gad’s Hill Place in Kent, where he moved
20 years later, was arranged here. I envisaged rather a miscellaneous jumble of
objects in a house with little real connection with the writer.
But as I started to explore the house I was proved wrong, as
it dawned on me what attention, planning and knowledge the curators had spent
evoking what went on there, as well as Dickens’s life story and the life of the
novels, then and now. In the downstairs dining room, where the Dickenses loved to
entertain, are plates painted with the names of guests such as Thackeray, a
recipe book (so many courses!), silver ladles featuring characters from The Pickwick Papers, and Dickens’s
minute instructions to his butler to close the inner hall doors as soon as the
gas was lighted.
The house gives a literal structure to Dickens’s life for
us. On the first floor is Dickens’s writing desk, its surface a mass of
scratches and marks. Next to it is a magazine showing an illustration of that
very desk with an empty chair next to it, marking Dickens’s death in the Christmas
1870 edition of The Graphic. Then one
floor up is a large print of that very photo enlarged on the wall opposite a
bed. Nearby is the lock of Dickens’s hair along with the last instalment of The Mystery of Edwin Drood,
half-finished when the author died. Nearby is a photo of the graves of his wife
Catherine, daughter Dora and sister-in-law Mary Hogarth.
This repetition — first the actual desk with a picture of it
in a contemporary magazine, then the same picture enlarged a floor up — is
quite rare in museums and made me think of the house partly as an artwork as
well as a scholarly creation, as though it were repeating a theme, appealing to
the emotions as well as conveying information. Inside the death-themed room too
it felt like an evocation of the writer’s death, a few metonymic objects standing
in for the reality, rather than a scholarly explanation.
The exhibitions included so well parts of the books — the laundry copper, like the one where the Cratchits in A Christmas Carol boiled the Christmas pudding (in the book the pudding still smelt a little of boiled clothes); parts of Dickens’s life, such as a note from his doctor showing he had a high pulse rate after he had publicly read the episode where Bill Sikes kills Nancy in Oliver Twist; and ways Dickens has influenced others, like an advert showing Barnaby Williams as Fagin at the Birkenhead Hippodrome in 1921. It tactfully acknowledged the life, while seeming to accept that museums can never capture the life and fun of one of the Dickens’s dinner parties.
The ghost of Dickens
As I left the house onto the terraced streets in the outer
edge of Bloomsbury, I found by worldview had momentarily changed – I noticed a
dreadlocked Deliveroo driver – what would Dickens have made of the gig economy?
– and bought a hot chocolate for a man begging outside Pret. A woman with a
white cane was being led away from the Royal National Institute of Blind People.
The ghost of Dickens, noticing those on the fringes of society, was briefly at
my shoulder.
