#51: Charles Dickens Museum

 

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.