“Whenever we visit a man for the first time, we contemplate the features of his knocker with the greatest curiosity, for we will know that, between the man and his knocker, there will inevitably be a greater or less degree of resemblance and similarity.”
The line, from Sketches by Boz in 1836, is classic Dickens. As a journalist and editor of popular middle-class periodicals such as Household Words and All The Year Round, Dickens surveyed all aspects of London life with “curiosity”, from the bestiary of inn signs to the faces on door-knockers.
To many of its inhabitants, Victorian London was noisy, smelly and diseased. Dickens reassured Londoners by depicting a web of connections that brought order to chaos, and made the confusing familiar, if still strangely magical.
A knocker and its owner had a relationship to each another. Nothing in the city was left to chance.
This month marks the bicentenary of Dickens’s birth, and the Museum of London’s exhibition is part of a wealth of new exhibitions, documentaries, biographies and television adaptations.
A contributor to a recent discussion on Radio 4’s Today programme got caught up in the excitement and claimed Dickens was the greatest writer in English after Shakespeare. We are in for more of this hyperbole.
Railway prose
At the risk of being Scroogeish, I must beg to differ. Dickens had an ear for cadence, an eye for idiosyncratic detail and a gift for sketching memorable characters. But the characters (particularly the women) are cut-outs.
The observation on knockers is witty on first reading, but hardly bears further scrutiny.
This is prose written quickly, to tight deadlines, and intended to be read at speed. Prose for a railway age, it huffs, it puffs and it clanks. But that doesn’t mean that the bicentenary of the birth of Dickens isn’t worth celebrating.
As one panel notes, Dickens’s writings form “a giant atlas of the life of the metropolis”. The exhibition juxtaposes the author’s texts with some of the street furniture that inspired it.
His comment on knockers appears next to a line of Victorian door knockers decorated with animal and human features. A galaxy of shop and other signs, from suns and moons to cocks and bulls, are suspended above the main gallery.
This fantastic display doubtless inspired the puns and plays on names that are so evident in Dickens’s novels.
The exhibition opens with a display featuring short descriptions of familiar Dickens characters above photographs of the author and his family and friends.
Though the illustrations of George Cruikshank certainly influenced the way that many readers imagined the scenes and characters described in The Old Curiosity Shop, Bleak House and Little Dorrit, the curators of this exhibition nonetheless faced something of a challenge.
Finding artefacts appropriate for an exhibition about a textual “atlas” of London cannot have been easy.
There is a risk of simply providing visitors with so many illustrations of this or that episode from Dickens’s life or novels. Though they may shed some light on the creative process, even a well-disposed visitor can only cope with so many corrected proofs and book manuscripts.
Happily, this exhibition includes many objects that take us much farther than mere illustration.
It packs a lot into a medium-sized space, without clutter (although the letters suspended from the ceiling are overkill). There are a number of objects used by the man himself, including his pen, desk, chair and several corrected proofs.
Dickens fans will certainly appreciate getting so close to these types of relics, which are commonly found in writers’ house museums.
The Dickensian city
There is also plenty for the rest of us to enjoy. One gallery is devoted to the Regency and Victorian stage, and includes costumes, playbooks and posters from pantomimes and vaudevilles, which inspired young Dickens.
There are also sheets of printed cut-out figures from his novels, which were published in sets for children to paint at home, enabling them to stage Dickensian dramas in their own toy theatres.
There is a clear line to be drawn here from Dickens’s novels, issued in instalments (with Dickens able to respond to his readers in “real time”) to today’s television and radio serials.
The author’s exhausting programme of reading tours, as well as the various play adaptations, indicate that he saw nothing wrong with encouraging people to consume his work as a series of well-loved setpieces.
There are several objects that visitors can handle, including a gilt coffin lid and a blacking pot similar to those labelled by a teenage Dickens at Warren’s Blacking Factory, located on what is now Charing Cross station.
I particularly enjoyed the display of objects recovered from Jacob’s Island, a notorious warren of muddy hovels in Bermondsey, that features in Oliver Twist.
I also enjoyed the use of video montage to create a constantly shifting backdrop to the main gallery. Here, details of period illustrations as well as photographs appear and dissolve into a foggy backdrop. This manages to nod to that “Dickensian city” we all carry about with us.
A film by William Raban, entitled The Houseless Shadow and commissioned for the exhibition, sets footage of today’s city to an 1861 account from Dickens’s Uncommercial Traveller describing a night spent walking London’s streets, from midnight until morning.
I was not the only visitor that found this compelling viewing, well worth watching from beginning to end.
Visible poor
That most “Dickensian” of urban atlases, Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré’s London: a Pilgrimage (1872), was nowhere to be found, but other than that the inclusion of work by artists such as George Scharf and William Powell Frith did an excellent job of showing how Dickens’s fascination for the city’s daily rhythms reflected a new way of viewing London.
Though they predate the author, Scharf’s exquisite pen and watercolour sketches depict the costume and trades visible from his St Martin’s Lane window at different hours of day with a “curiosity” that is very Dickensian.
Frith’s Railway Station (1862) is a super realist snapshot of Paddington, but it can also be read as an anthology of crimes, miseries and acts of kindness that we find everywhere in Dickens’s London.
Though he wrote rather than painted, the exhibition brilliantly shows how Dickens made the London poor visible to the middle and upper classes. Here they stepped out, as if for the first time, as a series of unforgettable characters caught up in unlikely escapades.
Did this in fact challenge Victorians to address the causes of poverty? Or did it simply make misery into a sentimental keepsake, making the poor a set of charming, yet ultimately irredeemable ragamuffins?
Whether the exhibition’s final panel is right in concluding that “Dickens’s ultimate aim was to reform and improve society” is a question visitors will have to answer for themselves.
Jonathan Conlin teaches history at the University of Southampton
The line, from Sketches by Boz in 1836, is classic Dickens. As a journalist and editor of popular middle-class periodicals such as Household Words and All The Year Round, Dickens surveyed all aspects of London life with “curiosity”, from the bestiary of inn signs to the faces on door-knockers.
To many of its inhabitants, Victorian London was noisy, smelly and diseased. Dickens reassured Londoners by depicting a web of connections that brought order to chaos, and made the confusing familiar, if still strangely magical.
A knocker and its owner had a relationship to each another. Nothing in the city was left to chance.
This month marks the bicentenary of Dickens’s birth, and the Museum of London’s exhibition is part of a wealth of new exhibitions, documentaries, biographies and television adaptations.
A contributor to a recent discussion on Radio 4’s Today programme got caught up in the excitement and claimed Dickens was the greatest writer in English after Shakespeare. We are in for more of this hyperbole.
Railway prose
At the risk of being Scroogeish, I must beg to differ. Dickens had an ear for cadence, an eye for idiosyncratic detail and a gift for sketching memorable characters. But the characters (particularly the women) are cut-outs.
The observation on knockers is witty on first reading, but hardly bears further scrutiny.
This is prose written quickly, to tight deadlines, and intended to be read at speed. Prose for a railway age, it huffs, it puffs and it clanks. But that doesn’t mean that the bicentenary of the birth of Dickens isn’t worth celebrating.
As one panel notes, Dickens’s writings form “a giant atlas of the life of the metropolis”. The exhibition juxtaposes the author’s texts with some of the street furniture that inspired it.
His comment on knockers appears next to a line of Victorian door knockers decorated with animal and human features. A galaxy of shop and other signs, from suns and moons to cocks and bulls, are suspended above the main gallery.
This fantastic display doubtless inspired the puns and plays on names that are so evident in Dickens’s novels.
The exhibition opens with a display featuring short descriptions of familiar Dickens characters above photographs of the author and his family and friends.
Though the illustrations of George Cruikshank certainly influenced the way that many readers imagined the scenes and characters described in The Old Curiosity Shop, Bleak House and Little Dorrit, the curators of this exhibition nonetheless faced something of a challenge.
Finding artefacts appropriate for an exhibition about a textual “atlas” of London cannot have been easy.
There is a risk of simply providing visitors with so many illustrations of this or that episode from Dickens’s life or novels. Though they may shed some light on the creative process, even a well-disposed visitor can only cope with so many corrected proofs and book manuscripts.
Happily, this exhibition includes many objects that take us much farther than mere illustration.
It packs a lot into a medium-sized space, without clutter (although the letters suspended from the ceiling are overkill). There are a number of objects used by the man himself, including his pen, desk, chair and several corrected proofs.
Dickens fans will certainly appreciate getting so close to these types of relics, which are commonly found in writers’ house museums.
The Dickensian city
There is also plenty for the rest of us to enjoy. One gallery is devoted to the Regency and Victorian stage, and includes costumes, playbooks and posters from pantomimes and vaudevilles, which inspired young Dickens.
There are also sheets of printed cut-out figures from his novels, which were published in sets for children to paint at home, enabling them to stage Dickensian dramas in their own toy theatres.
There is a clear line to be drawn here from Dickens’s novels, issued in instalments (with Dickens able to respond to his readers in “real time”) to today’s television and radio serials.
The author’s exhausting programme of reading tours, as well as the various play adaptations, indicate that he saw nothing wrong with encouraging people to consume his work as a series of well-loved setpieces.
There are several objects that visitors can handle, including a gilt coffin lid and a blacking pot similar to those labelled by a teenage Dickens at Warren’s Blacking Factory, located on what is now Charing Cross station.
I particularly enjoyed the display of objects recovered from Jacob’s Island, a notorious warren of muddy hovels in Bermondsey, that features in Oliver Twist.
I also enjoyed the use of video montage to create a constantly shifting backdrop to the main gallery. Here, details of period illustrations as well as photographs appear and dissolve into a foggy backdrop. This manages to nod to that “Dickensian city” we all carry about with us.
A film by William Raban, entitled The Houseless Shadow and commissioned for the exhibition, sets footage of today’s city to an 1861 account from Dickens’s Uncommercial Traveller describing a night spent walking London’s streets, from midnight until morning.
I was not the only visitor that found this compelling viewing, well worth watching from beginning to end.
Visible poor
That most “Dickensian” of urban atlases, Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré’s London: a Pilgrimage (1872), was nowhere to be found, but other than that the inclusion of work by artists such as George Scharf and William Powell Frith did an excellent job of showing how Dickens’s fascination for the city’s daily rhythms reflected a new way of viewing London.
Though they predate the author, Scharf’s exquisite pen and watercolour sketches depict the costume and trades visible from his St Martin’s Lane window at different hours of day with a “curiosity” that is very Dickensian.
Frith’s Railway Station (1862) is a super realist snapshot of Paddington, but it can also be read as an anthology of crimes, miseries and acts of kindness that we find everywhere in Dickens’s London.
Though he wrote rather than painted, the exhibition brilliantly shows how Dickens made the London poor visible to the middle and upper classes. Here they stepped out, as if for the first time, as a series of unforgettable characters caught up in unlikely escapades.
Did this in fact challenge Victorians to address the causes of poverty? Or did it simply make misery into a sentimental keepsake, making the poor a set of charming, yet ultimately irredeemable ragamuffins?
Whether the exhibition’s final panel is right in concluding that “Dickens’s ultimate aim was to reform and improve society” is a question visitors will have to answer for themselves.
Jonathan Conlin teaches history at the University of Southampton
Project data
- Exhibition cost £400,000
- Funder Museum of London
- Media partner The Times
- Curator Alex Werner
- Curation, content, design, conservation, installation and project management Museum of London
- Imaginative cityscape audiovisual installation Simolab Creative AV
- Dickens dream animation Laurie Hill
- Houseless Shadow William Raban
- Setworks production The Moule Partnership
- Lighting design DHA Design
- Graphics production Mintsource Visual Communications
- Scenic painting Annie Millar
- Display cases ClickNetherfield
- AV hardware 21st Century AV
- Object mounts in-house
- Object and case alarms Access Vision Technology
- Exhibition ends 10 June 2012
