What do we visit great writers’ houses for?
To pay our respects and rehearse familiar, well-worn stories? To sneak behind the scenes and catch a glimpse of the author in their den? And what is the attraction for those who aren’t familiar with the writer in question?
Like other London writers’ houses, the Charles Dickens Museum has its relics. Desks and glasses used by the Victorian author. A lock of his hair. But it also offers visitors an opportunity to enter “the Presence”.
As a quote from the actor Simon Callow on the museum’s website notes: “Dickens’s presence is unusually strong here.”
Bicentenary
Dickens lived at 48 Doughty Street, Bloomsbury, for just two years, between 1837 and 1839, and wrote The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist there.
Much of the furniture displayed within the house comes, not from this early phase of Dickens’s career, but from much later, when he lived in a larger more prosperous home in Gad’s Hill, Kent.
These items, including a clock on the stairs, seem rather out of place in a Regency terrace, their dark, bloated Victorian forms a world away from the lighter and daintier pieces young Dickens would have used when he lived here.
Whether intended as a shrine for devotees or a window on Dickens’s times, the Charles Dickens Museum faces a number of challenges.
The independent trust that originally acquired the house in 1923 used grants from the Heritage Lottery Fund and other foundations to buy the house next door and use it to accommodate a cafe, shop, offices and education spaces. It also permitted the installation of a lift, vastly improving disabled access.
Unfortunately, the refurbished and expanded museum opened on 10 December 2012, too late to benefit from the raft of Dickensiana unleashed by the bicentenary of his birth on 7 February 1812.
The trusts behind writers’ houses often see their resources exhausted by the cost of acquiring the house in question. Also, their agenda is frequently driven by reverence of “their” author.
As a result many struggle, both financially and intellectually, to find appropriate furnishings to put inside their museums.
A quill or two will only go so far. Dr Johnson’s House, for example, is something of a disappointing void. Other London writers’ houses, such as Carlyle’s House, positively bulge with knick-knacks and pictures.
The historian Thomas Carlyle moved into Cheyne Row three years before Dickens moved into Doughty Street.
At Carlyle’s House, the National Trust has done an excellent job of summoning up an atmosphere and presence, as well as illustrating 19th-century literary culture.
Quite an achievement, considering that Carlyle is almost entirely forgotten today, and was in many ways an unpleasant individual.
Yet few visitors, I suspect, leave Cheyne Row without some sense of having encountered a powerful if alien mind. Can the same be said of Doughty Street, as Callow claims?
Spartan setting
In terms of furnishing, the Dickens museum leans rather more towards the Johnson than the Carlyle end of the scale.
However, when it comes to pictures, particularly portraits, some rooms are rather overloaded. A family tree would have helped here. Visitors enter via the neighbouring house, picking up a booklet at the ticket desk.
This short guide begins just inside what was Dickens’s hallway, and leads us through the public rooms, down to the kitchen, scullery and laundry and then up through the family’s bedroom to the servants’ rooms in the attic.
Given the slightly spartan furnishing and lack of other information visitors are largely left to fend for themselves.
Though the rooms are small and this Regency terrace house pre-dates the Victorian age of the bibelot, slightly more effort could have been made to make this home feel lived in.
The dining room table is set with plates printed with the names and activities of Dickens’s closest friends from the 1830s, and a soundtrack supplies background noises of glasses clinking and carriages passing in the street.
Marshalsea grille
While we are able to go behind the scenes and see where the hard work that supported such entertaining was done, we learn little about domestic service in the period.
Much is made of Dickens’s sensitive portrayals of servants in his works, but visitors might wonder exactly what kind of employer he was.
In the drawing room on the first floor Dickens’s reading desk is preserved. It is accompanied by recorded excerpts from Callow’s excellent reenactments of the Victorian’s famous and popular public readings.
Next door is the study in which Dickens worked, where the majority of the Dickensian relics are displayed, along with, somewhat jarringly, modern editions of his works.
Upstairs are two bedrooms, one of which is the room in which the author’s beloved sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, died.
The guide indicates that this room is intended to reflect Dickens’s response to, and depiction of, death.
An important and very “Victorian” theme, but one which cannot be explored deeply with so few objects, texts or images on display.
Instead we move ever upward, to the attic, which addresses Dickens’s father, John Dickens, and the consequences for his young family of his financial problems.
These threw John into the south London debtors’ prison of the Marshalsea in Southwark (so movingly depicted in Little Dorrit) and Charles into menial labour in Warren’s blacking factory on Hungerford Stairs, where his job was to paste labels on jars.
A barred metal grille from the Marshalsea is the star attraction here, along with another window, which Dickens may have looked out of. Next door, the walls of a simple servant’s bedroom are stencilled with quotations from Dickens’s works.
It felt strange to come to this material last. We lose a sense of just what an achievement it was for the blacking boy to move into this respectable middle-class house terrace at the age of just 25.
A useful timeline of events in Dickens’s life and the wider world is included, but again, comes too late, after visitors have been to several rooms.
With the flexibility of having two staircases, a better visitor route should be possible.
More geographical orientation and context could also be offered. How new was this terrace when Dickens moved in? What sort of neighbourhood was it? Which church did he go to?
Such information may have featured in the three interactive stations, but none of them were working when I visited. Nor was a sound station with various recordings.
The illusive presence
Dickens challenged narrow Victorian respectability, but he courted it, too. Visitors see him as the campaigning reformer who challenged society, but not as the person who sought to keep his teenage lover, the actor Ellen Ternan,under wraps.
The timeline coyly draws a veil over their relationship. Here and in Dickens’s refusal to admit to having done menial work as a child (a social stigma at the time) there is a story of class lurking under the Regency wallpaper.
Casual visitors inevitably miss what is probably the museum’s most important role: as an educational resource for schools.
Small ancillary displays in the neighbouring house show that a wealth of such activities are going on, and are encouraging a genuinely creative response to Dickens and his concerns about inequality.
The relative paucity of objects in the original rooms may be a function of this: young children do not mix well with precious artefacts.
But with a bit more thought it should be possible to give the older, casual audience who aren’t Dickens obsessives more by way of orientation, information and, yes, presence.
Jonathan Conlin is a history lecturer at the University of Southampton
To pay our respects and rehearse familiar, well-worn stories? To sneak behind the scenes and catch a glimpse of the author in their den? And what is the attraction for those who aren’t familiar with the writer in question?
Like other London writers’ houses, the Charles Dickens Museum has its relics. Desks and glasses used by the Victorian author. A lock of his hair. But it also offers visitors an opportunity to enter “the Presence”.
As a quote from the actor Simon Callow on the museum’s website notes: “Dickens’s presence is unusually strong here.”
Bicentenary
Dickens lived at 48 Doughty Street, Bloomsbury, for just two years, between 1837 and 1839, and wrote The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist there.
Much of the furniture displayed within the house comes, not from this early phase of Dickens’s career, but from much later, when he lived in a larger more prosperous home in Gad’s Hill, Kent.
These items, including a clock on the stairs, seem rather out of place in a Regency terrace, their dark, bloated Victorian forms a world away from the lighter and daintier pieces young Dickens would have used when he lived here.
Whether intended as a shrine for devotees or a window on Dickens’s times, the Charles Dickens Museum faces a number of challenges.
The independent trust that originally acquired the house in 1923 used grants from the Heritage Lottery Fund and other foundations to buy the house next door and use it to accommodate a cafe, shop, offices and education spaces. It also permitted the installation of a lift, vastly improving disabled access.
Unfortunately, the refurbished and expanded museum opened on 10 December 2012, too late to benefit from the raft of Dickensiana unleashed by the bicentenary of his birth on 7 February 1812.
The trusts behind writers’ houses often see their resources exhausted by the cost of acquiring the house in question. Also, their agenda is frequently driven by reverence of “their” author.
As a result many struggle, both financially and intellectually, to find appropriate furnishings to put inside their museums.
A quill or two will only go so far. Dr Johnson’s House, for example, is something of a disappointing void. Other London writers’ houses, such as Carlyle’s House, positively bulge with knick-knacks and pictures.
The historian Thomas Carlyle moved into Cheyne Row three years before Dickens moved into Doughty Street.
At Carlyle’s House, the National Trust has done an excellent job of summoning up an atmosphere and presence, as well as illustrating 19th-century literary culture.
Quite an achievement, considering that Carlyle is almost entirely forgotten today, and was in many ways an unpleasant individual.
Yet few visitors, I suspect, leave Cheyne Row without some sense of having encountered a powerful if alien mind. Can the same be said of Doughty Street, as Callow claims?
Spartan setting
In terms of furnishing, the Dickens museum leans rather more towards the Johnson than the Carlyle end of the scale.
However, when it comes to pictures, particularly portraits, some rooms are rather overloaded. A family tree would have helped here. Visitors enter via the neighbouring house, picking up a booklet at the ticket desk.
This short guide begins just inside what was Dickens’s hallway, and leads us through the public rooms, down to the kitchen, scullery and laundry and then up through the family’s bedroom to the servants’ rooms in the attic.
Given the slightly spartan furnishing and lack of other information visitors are largely left to fend for themselves.
Though the rooms are small and this Regency terrace house pre-dates the Victorian age of the bibelot, slightly more effort could have been made to make this home feel lived in.
The dining room table is set with plates printed with the names and activities of Dickens’s closest friends from the 1830s, and a soundtrack supplies background noises of glasses clinking and carriages passing in the street.
Marshalsea grille
While we are able to go behind the scenes and see where the hard work that supported such entertaining was done, we learn little about domestic service in the period.
Much is made of Dickens’s sensitive portrayals of servants in his works, but visitors might wonder exactly what kind of employer he was.
In the drawing room on the first floor Dickens’s reading desk is preserved. It is accompanied by recorded excerpts from Callow’s excellent reenactments of the Victorian’s famous and popular public readings.
Next door is the study in which Dickens worked, where the majority of the Dickensian relics are displayed, along with, somewhat jarringly, modern editions of his works.
Upstairs are two bedrooms, one of which is the room in which the author’s beloved sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, died.
The guide indicates that this room is intended to reflect Dickens’s response to, and depiction of, death.
An important and very “Victorian” theme, but one which cannot be explored deeply with so few objects, texts or images on display.
Instead we move ever upward, to the attic, which addresses Dickens’s father, John Dickens, and the consequences for his young family of his financial problems.
These threw John into the south London debtors’ prison of the Marshalsea in Southwark (so movingly depicted in Little Dorrit) and Charles into menial labour in Warren’s blacking factory on Hungerford Stairs, where his job was to paste labels on jars.
A barred metal grille from the Marshalsea is the star attraction here, along with another window, which Dickens may have looked out of. Next door, the walls of a simple servant’s bedroom are stencilled with quotations from Dickens’s works.
It felt strange to come to this material last. We lose a sense of just what an achievement it was for the blacking boy to move into this respectable middle-class house terrace at the age of just 25.
A useful timeline of events in Dickens’s life and the wider world is included, but again, comes too late, after visitors have been to several rooms.
With the flexibility of having two staircases, a better visitor route should be possible.
More geographical orientation and context could also be offered. How new was this terrace when Dickens moved in? What sort of neighbourhood was it? Which church did he go to?
Such information may have featured in the three interactive stations, but none of them were working when I visited. Nor was a sound station with various recordings.
The illusive presence
Dickens challenged narrow Victorian respectability, but he courted it, too. Visitors see him as the campaigning reformer who challenged society, but not as the person who sought to keep his teenage lover, the actor Ellen Ternan,under wraps.
The timeline coyly draws a veil over their relationship. Here and in Dickens’s refusal to admit to having done menial work as a child (a social stigma at the time) there is a story of class lurking under the Regency wallpaper.
Casual visitors inevitably miss what is probably the museum’s most important role: as an educational resource for schools.
Small ancillary displays in the neighbouring house show that a wealth of such activities are going on, and are encouraging a genuinely creative response to Dickens and his concerns about inequality.
The relative paucity of objects in the original rooms may be a function of this: young children do not mix well with precious artefacts.
But with a bit more thought it should be possible to give the older, casual audience who aren’t Dickens obsessives more by way of orientation, information and, yes, presence.
Jonathan Conlin is a history lecturer at the University of Southampton
Project data
- Cost £3.1m
- Funders Heritage Lottery Fund £2m; English Heritage; City Bridge Trust; City of London Corporation; Foyle Foundation; Garfield Weston Foundation; John S Cohen Foundation; Wolfson Foundation
- Architect Purcell
