Charles Dickens was the original celebrity author who wrote prodigiously, toured tirelessly, controlled his own image and made a fortune.
He was so famous that when he visited America in 1842 he was unable to walk down the street without being mobbed. He was scared to get his hair cut in case locks of it were sold without his say-so. Like today’s celebrities, he courted fame while struggling with its effects.
“There is a duality in Dickens,” says Juliet John, the Hildred Carlile chair of English literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, and author of Dickens and Mass Culture.
“He appeals to people’s feelings of nostalgia, of community and family values. There is also a modernity about him where he is aware of the erosion of those values.
"He is a more modernist and self-conscious a writer than people perhaps think, and it’s because of this that he retains his cultural prominence. He created the Dickens cultural industry that persists today.”
It’s no surprise that this year’s bicentenary of his birth has provoked a frenzy of Dickens-related activity, from Belfast to the Bronx. There are exhibitions, festivals, films, television and stage adaptations, biographies, readings, lectures and symposia and talks.
As if that wasn’t enough there are also walking tours and heritage trails, sculptures and statues, banquets and dinners, art and writing projects and wreath-laying ceremonies.
In London, where he lived for many years and set lots of his novels, the bicentenary is one of the three key events in this year’s tourism calendar alongside the Olympics and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.
Dickens 2012 was set up in 2007 by the Charles Dickens Museum and Film London in partnership with The Dickens Fellowship, a worldwide association of people who share an interest in Dickens.
The aim has been to coordinate all the events and to provide a global portal for information. Museums, galleries and other cultural institutions can also add information about their plans to the Dickens 2012 website.
Communication routes
“We wanted an accessible structure so that curators could communicate and collaborate with each other, but also with organisations beyond the museum sector, and it has worked very well,” says Florian Schweizer, the director of the Charles Dickens Museum and Dickens 2012.
Museums and galleries are using the bicentenary to present their Dickens-related collections in new ways and are hoping to attract increased numbers of visitors.
The Museum of London opened its Dickens and London exhibition (until 10 June) late last year, and many other smaller museums and galleries are responding with events and activities around different aspects of the author’s writing. His passions were plentiful and included theatre, art, politics and class, urban poverty and social injustice and – famously – walking.
Unfortunately, the Charles Dickens Museum itself, the site of where Dickens wrote his early novels Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, will be closed for much of the bicentenary year because of delays in getting match funding for its Heritage Lottery Fund redevelopment grant. The museum will be shut between April and November, reopening in time for Christmas.
“We regret that we won’t be open but we will act as a signpost to other events and exhibitions,” says Schweizer.
“We have been working with other museums in France, Zurich and the US, and organising loans for many of the exhibitions around the country, and have been very happy doing this. We have been able, through Dickens 2012, to encourage more relaxed views on loans and smaller museums have benefited from this.”
In the past, says Schweizer, museums have failed to streamline efforts for big anniversaries, creating too many websites, competing for material or overlapping content in exhibitions and events.
“It’s been extraordinary and reassuring to see such helpful attitudes between museums this time, particularly in a period of recession and constraints on budgets,” he says.
“We’ve been able to introduce partners, combine communications and marketing strategies, release joint press releases and generally get people talking to each other.”
There is an abundance of Dickens-related material, though much of it is concentrated in London. The Victoria and Albert Museum holds most of the manuscripts, and the Charles Dickens Museum has more than 100,000 items.
Neither is staging major exhibitions but they have facilitated loans, and openings have been staggered to avoid mu-seums and galleries competing for objects.
Location, location
There are several house museums dedicated to Dickens, who was born in Portsmouth and lived in London and Kent for most of his life. Portsmouth City Council runs the birthplace museum.
The Charles Dickens Museum is in Doughty Street, London, his home between 1837 and 1839, and there is also a Dickens House Museum in Broadstairs, Kent, where Dickens holidayed with his family.
Other Medway towns have strong associations with Dickens, including Rochester, which holds two annual Dickens festivals and whose Guildhall Museum has a Dickens Discovery Room.
The Royal Engineers Museum, Library and Archive in Gillingham owns a set of Dickens first editions. There is also Dickens World, which is less of a museum and more of a visitor experience in Chatham, Kent, where he lived as a boy.
The major exhibition this year is Dickens and London at the Museum of London. “The exhibition is thematic rather than biographical, and focuses on how Dickens is seen today,” says curator Alex Werner.
“We’ve created an imaginative cityscape of three large projections and a contemporary film through which we are trying to show how his work is still relevant today. We commissioned an animator to make the famous Dream painting come to life, with his writing desk and chair from Gads Hill.”
Mark Bills, curator of the Watts Gallery in Compton, Surrey, says his museum found out what everyone else was doing first because it didn’t want to be competing for loans.
“Dickens 2012 gave us the opportunity to work with other museums, attending meetings so we met other venues, planning our exhibition to fit in with loans, and using the logo,” Bills says.
“We worked with the Museum of London, for example, sharing ideas and learning resources, which was helpful to a smaller institution like ours.”
The Watts’ exhibition will look at Dickens’s interest in art and his friendships with artists.
“Dickens as art critic, how he influenced artists such as Van Gogh, and how the social realist painters of the 1870s responded to his novels in return, is a neglected area,” says Bills.
“He gave confidence to a new generation of artists to depict subjects that were previously considered vulgar – William Powell Frith’s Derby Day and Ramsgate Sands, for instance. Before this people didn’t want contemporary costume pictures.”
Surveys show that the main reason that people visit Rochester in Kent is its association with Dickens. The town hosts two Dickens festivals a year and 2012 will attract more visitors, believes Jeremy Clarke, education officer at the Guildhall Museum, which holds a small collection of Dickens memorabilia.
“Museum visitor numbers increase tenfold on festival weekends and an exhibition of Dickens first editions, on loan from the Royal Engineers Museum, will draw even more people in”, says Clarke.
“We are stealing a march on 2012 with our adult reading project,” says Clarke. “Great Expectations is our big read because it is set in north Kent and the Guildhall appears in it.
"We have been reading it at the museum in the original instalments and talking about its themes in a weekly blog. We have strong 19th-century collections and are also using them to explore Dickens’s themes of the poor, travel, home and material culture.”
Dickens travelled widely, in the UK and mainland Europe. He also visited America twice, and his continuing global popularity means that museums around the world are celebrating his bicentenary too.
Variations on a theme
The Morgan Library & Museum in New York and the Lowell National Historical Park in Massachusetts are two of the places hosting events in the US.
The Morgan has digitised the manuscript of A Christmas Carol for its Dickens exhibition and one exhibit at Lowell is a Boston Line Type (an early form of Braille) edition of The Old Curiosity Shop donated by Dickens to the Perkins School for the Blind, which he visited in 1842. The British Council has organised a series of cultural and educational projects in over 50 countries.
These exhibitions and events have picked up on the complexity of the man and the multiplicity of interests in Dickens’s life and work that current biographers such as Claire Tomalin and Michael Slater have identified and examined.
“I think there will be variation on how Dickens is presented, with some exhibitions – like Dickens and London – making Dickens’s modernity more visible,” says Juliet John, from the Royal Holloway, who was also a member of the academic steering group for the Museum of London’s Dickens exhibition and a committee member of Dickens 2012.
“Museums tend to downplay his commercial side. Presenting the past commercially seems risky to curators because it is seen as antithetical to heritage.”
Dickens 2012 is the ideal opportunity to change that perception.
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance journalist.
Click here to read this month's review of Dickens and London at the Museum of London
The house in Portsmouth where Dickens was born in 1812 is now run by the city council as the Charles Dickens’ Birthplace Museum. The family left in 1815 but there are glimpses of Dickens’s life and work, such as a ring he gave the woman who inspired Little Dorrit and the couch on which he died.
The house itself is too small to be the focus of the bicentenary celebrations, explains Jane Mee, Portsmouth City Council’s museums and records service manager.
“We have part of the manuscript of Nicholas Nickleby, the only novel that mentions Portsmouth, on display at the City Museum, on loan from the British Library,” says Mee.
“But we also wanted to encourage people to come into the archives and see how familiar the material is. So our community archive project, A Tale of One City, was created on the back of Dickens, and runs until the end of 2012. We took as our starting point the question: what would Dickens be writing about today?
“The city’s archives beautifully illustrate his themes of social injustice, health, housing, poverty and work, all still relevant today,” adds Mee.
The project works across council departments, and Mee has trained staff from other sections to work with hard-to-reach groups from the city’s more deprived wards, including Charles Dickens ward itself, where the house is located.
“People look at items from the archives and learn archival techniques, and they have been creating their own photographic archives or oral histories,” she says.
“What has struck us is how people have taken it to their hearts. For example, seeing maps of bomb sites and a 19th-century report on the disorderly police conduct has been fascinating.
“We are having an exciting and inclusive experience on the back of Dickens, and I’m sure he would have been delighted,” concludes Mee.
www.charlesdickensbirthplace.co.uk/charles-dickens/a-tale-of-one-city
He was so famous that when he visited America in 1842 he was unable to walk down the street without being mobbed. He was scared to get his hair cut in case locks of it were sold without his say-so. Like today’s celebrities, he courted fame while struggling with its effects.
“There is a duality in Dickens,” says Juliet John, the Hildred Carlile chair of English literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, and author of Dickens and Mass Culture.
“He appeals to people’s feelings of nostalgia, of community and family values. There is also a modernity about him where he is aware of the erosion of those values.
"He is a more modernist and self-conscious a writer than people perhaps think, and it’s because of this that he retains his cultural prominence. He created the Dickens cultural industry that persists today.”
It’s no surprise that this year’s bicentenary of his birth has provoked a frenzy of Dickens-related activity, from Belfast to the Bronx. There are exhibitions, festivals, films, television and stage adaptations, biographies, readings, lectures and symposia and talks.
As if that wasn’t enough there are also walking tours and heritage trails, sculptures and statues, banquets and dinners, art and writing projects and wreath-laying ceremonies.
In London, where he lived for many years and set lots of his novels, the bicentenary is one of the three key events in this year’s tourism calendar alongside the Olympics and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.
Dickens 2012 was set up in 2007 by the Charles Dickens Museum and Film London in partnership with The Dickens Fellowship, a worldwide association of people who share an interest in Dickens.
The aim has been to coordinate all the events and to provide a global portal for information. Museums, galleries and other cultural institutions can also add information about their plans to the Dickens 2012 website.
Communication routes
“We wanted an accessible structure so that curators could communicate and collaborate with each other, but also with organisations beyond the museum sector, and it has worked very well,” says Florian Schweizer, the director of the Charles Dickens Museum and Dickens 2012.
Museums and galleries are using the bicentenary to present their Dickens-related collections in new ways and are hoping to attract increased numbers of visitors.
The Museum of London opened its Dickens and London exhibition (until 10 June) late last year, and many other smaller museums and galleries are responding with events and activities around different aspects of the author’s writing. His passions were plentiful and included theatre, art, politics and class, urban poverty and social injustice and – famously – walking.
Unfortunately, the Charles Dickens Museum itself, the site of where Dickens wrote his early novels Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, will be closed for much of the bicentenary year because of delays in getting match funding for its Heritage Lottery Fund redevelopment grant. The museum will be shut between April and November, reopening in time for Christmas.
“We regret that we won’t be open but we will act as a signpost to other events and exhibitions,” says Schweizer.
“We have been working with other museums in France, Zurich and the US, and organising loans for many of the exhibitions around the country, and have been very happy doing this. We have been able, through Dickens 2012, to encourage more relaxed views on loans and smaller museums have benefited from this.”
In the past, says Schweizer, museums have failed to streamline efforts for big anniversaries, creating too many websites, competing for material or overlapping content in exhibitions and events.
“It’s been extraordinary and reassuring to see such helpful attitudes between museums this time, particularly in a period of recession and constraints on budgets,” he says.
“We’ve been able to introduce partners, combine communications and marketing strategies, release joint press releases and generally get people talking to each other.”
There is an abundance of Dickens-related material, though much of it is concentrated in London. The Victoria and Albert Museum holds most of the manuscripts, and the Charles Dickens Museum has more than 100,000 items.
Neither is staging major exhibitions but they have facilitated loans, and openings have been staggered to avoid mu-seums and galleries competing for objects.
Location, location
There are several house museums dedicated to Dickens, who was born in Portsmouth and lived in London and Kent for most of his life. Portsmouth City Council runs the birthplace museum.
The Charles Dickens Museum is in Doughty Street, London, his home between 1837 and 1839, and there is also a Dickens House Museum in Broadstairs, Kent, where Dickens holidayed with his family.
Other Medway towns have strong associations with Dickens, including Rochester, which holds two annual Dickens festivals and whose Guildhall Museum has a Dickens Discovery Room.
The Royal Engineers Museum, Library and Archive in Gillingham owns a set of Dickens first editions. There is also Dickens World, which is less of a museum and more of a visitor experience in Chatham, Kent, where he lived as a boy.
The major exhibition this year is Dickens and London at the Museum of London. “The exhibition is thematic rather than biographical, and focuses on how Dickens is seen today,” says curator Alex Werner.
“We’ve created an imaginative cityscape of three large projections and a contemporary film through which we are trying to show how his work is still relevant today. We commissioned an animator to make the famous Dream painting come to life, with his writing desk and chair from Gads Hill.”
Mark Bills, curator of the Watts Gallery in Compton, Surrey, says his museum found out what everyone else was doing first because it didn’t want to be competing for loans.
“Dickens 2012 gave us the opportunity to work with other museums, attending meetings so we met other venues, planning our exhibition to fit in with loans, and using the logo,” Bills says.
“We worked with the Museum of London, for example, sharing ideas and learning resources, which was helpful to a smaller institution like ours.”
The Watts’ exhibition will look at Dickens’s interest in art and his friendships with artists.
“Dickens as art critic, how he influenced artists such as Van Gogh, and how the social realist painters of the 1870s responded to his novels in return, is a neglected area,” says Bills.
“He gave confidence to a new generation of artists to depict subjects that were previously considered vulgar – William Powell Frith’s Derby Day and Ramsgate Sands, for instance. Before this people didn’t want contemporary costume pictures.”
Surveys show that the main reason that people visit Rochester in Kent is its association with Dickens. The town hosts two Dickens festivals a year and 2012 will attract more visitors, believes Jeremy Clarke, education officer at the Guildhall Museum, which holds a small collection of Dickens memorabilia.
“Museum visitor numbers increase tenfold on festival weekends and an exhibition of Dickens first editions, on loan from the Royal Engineers Museum, will draw even more people in”, says Clarke.
“We are stealing a march on 2012 with our adult reading project,” says Clarke. “Great Expectations is our big read because it is set in north Kent and the Guildhall appears in it.
"We have been reading it at the museum in the original instalments and talking about its themes in a weekly blog. We have strong 19th-century collections and are also using them to explore Dickens’s themes of the poor, travel, home and material culture.”
Dickens travelled widely, in the UK and mainland Europe. He also visited America twice, and his continuing global popularity means that museums around the world are celebrating his bicentenary too.
Variations on a theme
The Morgan Library & Museum in New York and the Lowell National Historical Park in Massachusetts are two of the places hosting events in the US.
The Morgan has digitised the manuscript of A Christmas Carol for its Dickens exhibition and one exhibit at Lowell is a Boston Line Type (an early form of Braille) edition of The Old Curiosity Shop donated by Dickens to the Perkins School for the Blind, which he visited in 1842. The British Council has organised a series of cultural and educational projects in over 50 countries.
These exhibitions and events have picked up on the complexity of the man and the multiplicity of interests in Dickens’s life and work that current biographers such as Claire Tomalin and Michael Slater have identified and examined.
“I think there will be variation on how Dickens is presented, with some exhibitions – like Dickens and London – making Dickens’s modernity more visible,” says Juliet John, from the Royal Holloway, who was also a member of the academic steering group for the Museum of London’s Dickens exhibition and a committee member of Dickens 2012.
“Museums tend to downplay his commercial side. Presenting the past commercially seems risky to curators because it is seen as antithetical to heritage.”
Dickens 2012 is the ideal opportunity to change that perception.
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance journalist.
Click here to read this month's review of Dickens and London at the Museum of London
Dickens and Portsmouth
The house in Portsmouth where Dickens was born in 1812 is now run by the city council as the Charles Dickens’ Birthplace Museum. The family left in 1815 but there are glimpses of Dickens’s life and work, such as a ring he gave the woman who inspired Little Dorrit and the couch on which he died.
The house itself is too small to be the focus of the bicentenary celebrations, explains Jane Mee, Portsmouth City Council’s museums and records service manager.
“We have part of the manuscript of Nicholas Nickleby, the only novel that mentions Portsmouth, on display at the City Museum, on loan from the British Library,” says Mee.
“But we also wanted to encourage people to come into the archives and see how familiar the material is. So our community archive project, A Tale of One City, was created on the back of Dickens, and runs until the end of 2012. We took as our starting point the question: what would Dickens be writing about today?
“The city’s archives beautifully illustrate his themes of social injustice, health, housing, poverty and work, all still relevant today,” adds Mee.
The project works across council departments, and Mee has trained staff from other sections to work with hard-to-reach groups from the city’s more deprived wards, including Charles Dickens ward itself, where the house is located.
“People look at items from the archives and learn archival techniques, and they have been creating their own photographic archives or oral histories,” she says.
“What has struck us is how people have taken it to their hearts. For example, seeing maps of bomb sites and a 19th-century report on the disorderly police conduct has been fascinating.
“We are having an exciting and inclusive experience on the back of Dickens, and I’m sure he would have been delighted,” concludes Mee.
www.charlesdickensbirthplace.co.uk/charles-dickens/a-tale-of-one-city
What the Dickens
- Charles Dickens at 200, Morgan Library & Museum, New York, until 12 February
- The Mysteries of Charles Dickens, Museum Strauhof, Zurich, until 4 March
- A Hankering after Ghosts: Charles Dickens and the Supernatural, Folio Society Gallery, British Library, London, until 4 March
- Charles Dickens: Life & Legacy, National Portrait Gallery, London, until 22 April
- Chapter One. I Am Born: 200 Years of Charles Dickens, Dunedin City Library, New Zealand, 9 February-6 May
- Dickens, Royal Academy of Music Museum, London, May to September
- Dickens and the Artists, Watts Gallery, Surrey, 19 June-28 October
- Charles Dickens Bicentenary, Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, until 31 December