On the 4th of March 1846 a certain Dominic Scuri or Scuroni was indicted for fraudulently obtaining money from Charles Dickens. Scuroni, an Italian impostor, had called at Dickens’s house under false pretences, declaring himself to be the Italian exile Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872) and defrauded the novelist of the sum of two pounds. It was in the context of this unfortunate beginning that Dickens met Mazzini and invited him to dine at his Devonshire Terrace home.
Persecuted by the Piedmontese authorities, Mazzini had fled Italy and found exile in England in 1837. In London, Mazzini tirelessly continued his political and conspiratorial activities aimed at the establishment of a united, independent, and republican Italy. Indubitably, Dickens had heard of Mazzini well before the two men unintentionally crossed paths. Another Italian exile, Antonio Gallenga (1810-1895), a follower of Mazzini, was for a short time Dickens’s teacher of Italian language. Years later, it was revealed that the same Gallenga, under his nom de guerre ‘Procida’, had been involved in an attempt to assassinate Charles Albert, the Piedmontese King. Mazzini had allegedly given ‘Procida’ the dagger with which the regicide was to be carried out.
In 1844, the British Government was accused of having spied upon the revolutionary Mazzini. His correspondence had been unlawfully intercepted and tampered with. An outraged Dickens and other Victorian grandees, notably Thomas Carlyle, lost no time in robustly voicing their protest in support of the Italian exile.
It was soon after the Scuroni incident that Dickens took up Mazzini’s invitation and visited the Free Italian School in Hatton Garden. Mazzini had set up the school in 1841 with the aim of educating and ameliorating the conditions of the many Italian migrants, often living in squalor in overcrowded and insalubrious cheap boarding-houses. Dickens, knowing only too well the hardship of poverty, lent his support and donated some money to the institution.
The school was completely free to students and classes were held in the evening to encourage attendance. The teachers were unpaid volunteers. Among them were such prominent figures as Gabriele Rossetti, count Carlo Pepoli, and the improvisatore Filippo Pistrucci. The renowned American writer and journalist Margaret Fuller addressed the students on more than one occasion. Mazzini himself did his share of teaching but, at first, remained in the shadows to avoid any possible association between the Free Italian School and ‘Young Italy’, the revolutionary political organisation he was the leader of. The popularity of the school surpassed all expectations. Regular and irregular attendees soon exceeded the figure of two hundred, and even included a few female students.
However, the school had many opponents and detractors too. Sir Anthony Panizzi, eminent Italian exile and Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum, expressed his disapproval and grave concern. Carlyle cautioned his wife not to get involved with what he called «a nest of young conspirators». Many saw in the school a ploy to indoctrinate children and teach them the four ‘Rs’, reading, ’riting, ’rithmetic, and revolution.
In July 1849, after the fall of the Roman Republic, Mazzini, one of the Triumvirs who had led the short-lived republican government, was once again forced to go underground. An apprehensive Dickens wrote «I am very anxious Mazzini should come home and not get in danger, for the world cannot well afford to lose such a man». Later that year, Dickens wrote An Appeal to the English People on Behalf of the Italian Refugees. An Italian translation was published in L’Italia del Popolo, one of Mazzini’s political journals.
The two men were also linked by their association to the London Library. Both Dickens and Mazzini were members of the institution. Dickens had the additional accolade of being a founding member, whilst Mazzini, a fine connoisseur of Italian history and literature, assisted Carlyle in putting together the core of the London Library’s Italian collections.
In his Pictures from Italy, with plenty of wit, Dickens lays forth a personal and vivid description of Italy and Italian society. In the prefatory introduction, he states that «Neither will there be found, in these pages, any grave examination into the government or misgovernment of any portion of the country», wishing to remain above any political judgment and giving his reportage the force of truth. Dickens’s support for Mazzini and his affection for Italy, however, tells us another, more subtle, story.
This article was written by Andrea Del Cornò – The London Library.
Was Charles Dickens the 'haunted man?'
Christmas remains one of the most cherished times of the year. We all eagerly await a season of twinkling lights, colourful presents and mouth-watering roast turkey. It is a time of goodwill, when we make a conscious effort to be that little bit nicer, kinder or caring to those around us.
But there is another side of Christmas that isn’t always acknowledged. Amidst all the cheer and the parties and the merriment, Christmas can be a poignant time. For those who have lost loved ones, it can be a time in which we are reminded that there is one less space at the dinner table.
Charles Dickens is famous for popularising many of our modern Christmas traditions. But he was also only too aware that it can be a time of suffering, especially after he lost his own sister in 1848. That same year, he penned his fifth and final Christmas book, The Haunted Man.
In many ways, The Haunted Man is made up of all the key ingredients for a wonderful Dickensian Christmas. It has a grizzled older man as the main character, who is visited by a supernatural being in an effort to make him a better person. But whereas A Christmas Carol is magical and fantastical, The Haunted Man is much more human, deeply personal and powerful.
The main character is Stephen Redlaw. He is a successful and famous scientist but he is suffering from grief, caused by the death of his sister (the parallels with Dickens himself are immediately apparent). It has left him disillusioned but importantly and unlike Scrooge, Redlaw is still a kind man. He encounters a ghost which is an eerie likeness of himself:
“Ghastly and cold, colourless in its leaden face and hands, but with his [Redlaw’s] features, and his bright eyes, and his grizzled hair, and dressed in the gloomy shadow of his dress, it came into his terrible appearance of existence, motionless, without a sound.”
The phantom and Redlaw agree to a bargain that bestows upon Redlaw a gift; he will lose any painful or sorrowful memory and he will have the ability to pass the gift on to anyone he touches. Almost immediately, however, Redlaw realises that when we lose our ability to feel pain or sorrow, we also lose our ability to feel love and compassion. Where he anticipates feeling happiness and joy, instead he feels increasingly numb and uncaring. In many ways, the phantom from The Haunted Man does the exact opposite to the ghosts from A Christmas Carol: he takes a kind man and makes him miserable.
It is this gift, far more than the phantom, which comes to haunt Redlaw. After transmitting his gift to other characters and seeing the damage he is inflicting upon them, he exclaims, “I am infected! I am infectious! I am charged with poison for my own mind, and the minds of all mankind. Where I felt interest, compassion, sympathy, I am turning into stone.”
Eventually the curse is lifted after Redlaw encounters his cook, Milly. She is a kindly woman with great care and compassion within her. She reveals to Redlaw that she has also known deep grief and sorrow, but that she has made peace with her pain. She tells Redlaw that it is through her suffering that she is able to have a deeper care for other people, “When I see a beautiful child in its fond mother’s arms, I love it all the better, thinking that my child might have been like that, and might have made my heart as proud and happy.”
The book ends with a great feast, full of the classic Dickensian festive cheer. Redlaw is not transformed in the way of Scrooge – he was already a kind man – but he has learnt to cherish the memory of the people he has loved and lost. He no longer fears his grief, but instead knows that his bittersweet memories will sustain him and make him kinder and ultimately happier.
The Haunted Man is a beautiful story. It is a powerful insight into Dickens’s own state of mind, following the loss of his sister and his struggles with grief and depression. The vivid descriptions of Redlaw’s numbness, lack of compassion and ‘turning into stone’ are instantly recognisable to anyone who has suffered from grief. It is also important to remember that Redlaw was kind at the beginning of the book, and his ‘gift’ did not stop him from being generous. He still gives money to those who need it, for example. But he cannot bring himself to feel genuine compassion for those he helps, and for Dickens this is a real problem. Doing good is not enough, it’s important to be a good person in your heart. Through Redlaw’s gift (and allegorically through Dickens’s grief) there is a sense that this internal goodness has vanished, even though the good actions are still there.
If we think about the process of Redlaw’s ‘gift,’ it is granted to him supernaturally, by the ghost. But it is not lifted by an encounter with a phantom, but rather by the company of Milly. From Dickens’s description, the ‘gift’ granted to Redlaw causes feelings of depression. The fact that this gift is granted supernaturally is quite reflective of real mental health problems, which can often develop in the sufferer unexpectedly and without obvious cause. Similarly the fact that the gift is lifted by the kind cheer of Milly is also reflective of the fact that poor mental health can be alleviated, if not cured, but the kindness of others.
Although we often tend to think about poor mental health as a modern subject, Dickens was acutely aware of how devastating it can be. In his essay, ‘Night Walks,’ he described a real man called Horace Kinch, who appeared to the world to have it all; he was financially secure, had a wife and family and was in the prime of his life. But Dickens describes him as suffering from Dry Rot in a man and relays how Kinch’s life fell apart. In the same way that a plank of wood suffering from dry rot will look fine, until it crumbles into dust, so Dickens writes how no one knew there was anything wrong with Horace Kinch, until it was too late. Dickens uses this same vivid, descriptive, powerfully emotive understanding of mental health to create the powerful festive tale which is The Haunted Man. Suffering himself after the death of his sister, he poured his own mental anguish, pain and reflections into the story. It is almost as though Dickens himself is undergoing the journey alongside Redlaw, rediscovering the meaning of happiness and learning to cherish the memory of his loved ones. Perhaps it was Dickens himself who was the real haunted man.
That’s not to say that The Haunted Man is a depressing read. It is coloured with all the same vibrant comedy as Dickens's other works. His characters are caricatures, glorious pantomimes and incredibly memorable. His vivid descriptions transport you to another world and immerse you into 1840s London. But the emotional connection is powerful and timeless. Anyone who has suffered from grief or from poor mental health will recognise it, and will be warmed by the powerful and moving ending.
To Dickens, Christmas was always a time for joy, but also for remembrance. It is a time when lost loved ones should not be absent, but should be with us all in spirit. Redlaw learns to reflect and change, as he realises that grief is a reflection of our love, and that only by making peace with our pain can we really start to love again. The Haunted Man was written nearly 175 years ago. Yet the deeply human, sympathetic and moving message is just as relevant today as it has ever been.
If you are interested in seeing a performance of The Haunted Man, we are hosting a virtual production over zoom on Sunday 4th December 2022.
Click here to find out more.
The House which inspired Oliver Twist
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London! – that great place! – nobody, not even Mr Bumble – could ever find him there! He has often heard the old men in the workhouse, too, say that no lad of spirit need want in London; and that there were ways of living in that vast city, which those who had been bred up in country parts had no idea of.
London! It is still an incredible place, almost two centuries after Charles Dickens first wrote those words. For Dickens, London was his ‘magic lantern.’ It’s true that at times he found it too much – too much noise, too much dirt, too much filth. But once away from the grime of the big city, he found he struggled to write without it. That’s probably how most Londoners feel today. How often we all moan about the capital; the tube, the train, the hustle and bustle. Yet take us away for just a few days, and we’re hankering to get back again.
Dickens used London to fuel his imagination. He wandered the winding streets, even at night, making notes on the people and the places he encountered. His stories are full of the small details which smack of the real and the intimate. Remember the little orphan, Oliver Twist, asking the beadle every quarter of a mile, “Are we there yet?”
It is Oliver Twist in particular, which is perhaps Dickens’s most well-loved novel. It’s got it all; love, betrayal, hope and murder. It is filled with some of the most memorable characters ever created in English literature. It was written in the study, here at 48 Doughty Street, and perhaps more than any other Dickens novel, it is intimately connected with the London that Dickens encountered while living here.
Flanking Doughty Street are two smaller streets, known as ‘mews.’ These were stables where horses, coaches and grooms were housed. One of these is called Brownlow Mews, so Dickens may have taken his character’s name from his local stable!
There are two other real, but rather heartbreaking, examples of local places which may well have inspired Oliver Twist. Firstly, just a short walk from Doughty Street was the Foundling Hospital. This was a place in which parents who could not look after their children, usually through extreme poverty, could leave their children to be raised by the charity instead.
Dickens was a financial supporter of the Foundling Hospital through much of his life, so he encountered orphaned and abandoned children on a fairly regular basis. The concept of a child being separated from their family, through extreme poverty and abandonment, was something that would have been very present in Dickens’s community.
Just a 20-minute walk from Dickens’s front door was the Strand Union workhouse on Cleveland Street. The purpose of the workhouses was to provide care as cheaply as possible for people with no other means of support. In the 1830s, they were deliberately harsh places so as not to encourage people to stay any longer than necessary. Families who were admitted to the workhouse would be separated and given work to do in return for food and shelter.
Dickens begins Oliver Twist with a young woman’s death, in childbirth, in a workhouse.
“She was brought here last night,” replied the old woman, “by the overseer’s order. She was found lying in the street; - she had walked some distance, for her shoes were worn to pieces; but where she came from, or where she was going to, nobody knows.”
The surgeon leant over the body, and raised the left hand. “The old story,” he said, shaking his head: “no wedding ring, I see. Ah! Goodnight.”
Oliver Twist was a story which was written to be relatable and believable. The callous attitude of the workhouse staff, and the shocking reality of an exhausted, pregnant woman being found lying in the street, were things which ordinary people would have been familiar with in their own daily lives. The proximity of Doughty Street to both the Strand Workhouse and the Foundling Hospital makes it easy to see how the idea of an orphan’s tale may have formed in Dickens’s mind.
Dickens sought out the less ‘respectable’ parts of London to explore. Think of his description as Oliver follows the Artful Dodger to the home of Fagin:
A dirtier or more wretched place he had never seen. The street was very narrow and muddy, and the air was impregnated with filthy odurs. There were a good many small shops; but the only stock in trade seemed to be heaps of children, who, even at that time of night, were crawling in and out of doors, or screaming from the inside. The sole places that seemed to prosper amid the general blight of the place were the public-houses … drunken men and women were positively wallowing in filth; and from several doorways, great ill-looking fellows were cautiously emerging, bound, to all appearance, upon no very well-disposed or harmless errands.
This passage describes Saffron Hill, a real street in London less than 10 minutes’ walk from Dickens’s own front door. This scene is presented as part of a work of fiction, but it is very likely to be Dickens’s own, very real, perception of what he saw as he wandered through Saffron Hill late at night.
Oliver Twist was also inspired by the private life of Dickens, while he lived here at 48 Doughty Street. When Charles and Catherine moved here, they were joined by Catherine’s sister, Mary Hogarth; it was common practice for a younger sister to learn how to manage a home and family this way.
One night, in May 1837, after the family returned from an evening at the theatre, Mary collapsed and fell into unconsciousness. She died the following day. Aged only 17, her death had a profound effect on the whole family, and Dickens even missed the publication date for that month’s installment of Oliver Twist. But he also introduced a new character into the novel: Rose Maylie, a young woman of Mary’s age, is sweet, innocent and kind. She transpires to be Oliver’s maternal aunt, just as Mary was the aunt to Dickens’s own children. In the novel, she too falls ill and Dickens describes:
Oh! The suspense, the fearful, acute suspense, of standing quite idly by while the life of one we dearly love, is trembling in the balance! Oh! The racking thoughts that crowd upon the mind, and make the heart beat violently, and the breath come thick, by the force of the images they conjure up before it; the desperate anxiety to be doing something to relieve the pain, or lessen the danger, which we have no power to alleviate; the sinking of soul and spirit, which the sad remembrance of our helplessness produces; what tortures can equal these?
In Oliver Twist, however, Rose recovers. She finds happiness, gets married, and cares for Oliver. Dickens creates the happy ending for Rose that he could not give to Mary.
Could Charles Dickens have written Oliver Twist had he not lived here in 48 Doughty Street? Of course he could. His mind was full of creative genius. But would his story have become the book it did? Perhaps not. His proximity to real orphaned children, to the workhouse, to Saffron Hill and the poverty that permeated it, all helped shape his writing. The loss of Mary Hogarth, while living here, caused Dickens to reshape the novel, introduce themes of anxiety, loss, love and hope in new ways. 48 Doughty Street may not have created the whole tale of Oliver Twist, but it certainly helped inspire a story that is more than a book; it is a literary masterpiece. As Dickens himself summarised:
I have perhaps the best subject I ever thought of… I have thrown my whole heart and soul into Oliver Twist…
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For some people, reading a great classic novel such as Oliver Twist or Great Expectations comes easily. The writing style of Charles Dickens is amazing. His stories are vivid and descriptive, often sassy and sarcastic. There is certainly a reason why the work of Dickens continues to be enjoyed almost 200 years after it was first created.
But for the rest of us, reading a Dickens novel isn’t quite as immediately enjoyable. Familiar as we all are with characters like Ebenezer Scrooge and the Artful Dodger, many of us were introduced to these characters not by the great author himself, but through the many modern popular adaptations of his work. Think The Muppet Christmas Carol, or the 1960 musical Oliver!
We’ve put together a list of handy tips to help transform the way you read a Dickens book. Give them a try – before long you’ll be hooked!
For some people, reading a great classic novel such as Oliver Twist or Great Expectations comes easily. The writing style of Charles Dickens is amazing. His stories are vivid and descriptive, often sassy and sarcastic. There is certainly a reason why the work of Dickens continues to be enjoyed almost 200 years after it was first created.
But for the rest of us, reading a Dickens novel isn’t quite as immediately enjoyable. Familiar as we all are with characters like Ebenezer Scrooge and the Artful Dodger, many of us were introduced to these characters not by the great author himself, but through the many modern popular adaptations of his work. Think The Muppet Christmas Carol, or the 1960 musical Oliver!
For those of us who are, perhaps, less prepared for the style and writing of Charles Dickens, opening one of his books can be a bit overwhelming. They are usually pretty large texts and they are filled with words and phrases we no longer use. So reading A Tale of Two Cities will introduce you to some ‘wide jawed’ kings, while even A Christmas Carol uses wonderful old phrases such as ‘gladsome looks’ or bestowing a ‘trifle’ which immediately conjures up images of pouring custard and cream over someone.
Then there are the distractions. To those of us who were raised on the beautifully structured, tidy chapters of Harry Potter, Dickens’s style can be surprising. He simply wanders off on tangents which are seemingly insignificant to the rest of the story. In A Christmas Carol, for example, he spends a good few paragraphs discussing the appropriateness of the phrase ‘dead as a doornail,’ or in Oliver Twist he spends a good section of chapter one relaying how unimportant it is that he wastes the readers time in telling us which town little Oliver was born in.
In fact, what most people don’t realise is that Dickens – certainly in his early works such as The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist – did not set out to publish complete novels in their entirety. He actually published them section by section in various newspapers and magazines: so just as we feverishly wait for Disney to release the latest episode of The Mandalorian, so too did the Victorian audience await the latest instalment of Oliver Twist.
Dickens was also writing in a way which was designed to be read out loud. It’s worth remembering that in 1836 when the first Dickens stories began to appear, a huge chunk of the British population was illiterate. Stories from the newspapers and magazines would be read out in pubs, with families around the fire, among friend groups or in the many coffee shops and gin palaces which were dotted around London. So when Dickens says he won’t waste your time, but then proceeds to do just that, or when he spends a great deal of time debating the appropriateness of the phrase ‘dead as a doornail’ he is joking with you, the reader. Imagine that these tangents are being read out in a crowded room over a gin or a mug of ale, by a reader who is putting on impersonations and you begin to see why Dickens wrote the way he did. What he created time and time again was less a simple book, but rather something which was more like a novel, a movie and a pantomime all rolled into one.
But knowing this doesn’t necessarily make it any easier to read. The long sentences, Victorian cultural references and strange ways of speaking can turn the exercise of reading a Dickens novel into a bit of a chore. How often have you gone to read one of his books, only to give up by chapter three?
But don’t give in! Dickens is a writer who is perhaps rivalled in England only by William Shakespeare. His work has transformed the world we live in, from the way we celebrate Christmas, to our understanding of class and poverty. He has come to define the age he lived in and in many ways, created our imagining of Victorian London. We’ve put together a list of handy tips to help transform the way you read a Dickens book. Give them a try – before long you’ll be hooked!
Trust us, if you’ve never read a Dickens book before and you begin by foraying into Great Expectations or Bleak House, you’re going to get stuck pretty quickly. In fact, even Dickens’s contemporaries were aware of a change in style by Dickens as he got older. Later books such as Bleak House and Little Dorrit were seen at the time as much more serious social commentaries. They remained popular, but they didn’t have quite the same charm and comedy as some of the earlier novels. They were books which were written with a much more serious purpose than to simply entertain. If you are unused to Dickens’s style of writing and language, start with a relatively easy book such as A Christmas Carol or Oliver Twist.
Have a quick google of the various characters you’ll be reading about before you start. True you wouldn’t normally skip to the ending when starting a new book, but these books are well over a century old, so you probably won’t find any spoilers. Getting a quick summary of the plotline and characters can be a really useful way of staying focused. Plus, when you’re less worried about following the storyline, you’ll be more relaxed and open to enjoying amazing descriptions and imagery which is created by Dickens through his writing. You will recognise people as they are introduced to you, and will be more savvy to the inside jokes and references made by Dickens. Looking up the story before you read it may seem like a real cheat, but it can really help you appreciate the real genius of Dickens and his colourful descriptions.
On one hand reading is a lovely hobby which helps you escape the techno-obsessed world we live in. But the books written by Dickens can be full of cultural references and phrases which are not familiar to us in 2021. Sometimes it’s worth having your phone or computer near you so that you can quickly look up something which isn’t clear to you. It’s worth doing, as some of the jokes and comments made by Dickens are hilarious when you know the context, so well worth looking up.
Most books written in the modern world are designed to be read quickly. They tend to be clearly structured and simple reads, often created with people’s commutes in mind. Dickens novels on the other hand, were created to fill the time in the evening. Think of each chapter as an episode of your favourite TV programme: they are witty, descriptive, often quite long and written to be savoured and enjoyed. Often the characters are comical and are just waiting to be impersonated. Take your time to savour each sentence and paragraph, don’t try and hurry on to the next bit. Sit back, when reading his books, and really try to conjure up the image of what Dickens is writing about. You won’t be disappointed.
Alright you probably won’t want to read out loud if you are sat on the train home (and your fellow commuters may not thank you either, although you never know!). But when you are reading alone of an evening, if you start to stumble on a sentence, or reach a part of the story which is difficult to follow, start reading out loud instead of in your mind. Most of Dickens’s work was designed to be read out, and his literary style is very conversational. You’d be surprised how often reading out loud instead of in your mind can really help you follow what is going on.
If you’re feeling extra confident, or if there’s no one about to hear you, read the accents out loud too. Dickens was himself a keen performer and he wanted his stories to be read out and performed. He often wrote character speech in accents, particularly in the cockney accent, and when you start reading to yourself in this way you’ll be amazed how his sentences and tangents all suddenly make a lot more sense!
As much as us Brits are famously anti-social, novels by Dickens were meant to be read in public and you’ll really see the comedy and wit a lot more when you read one of his books with someone else. Try making a book club, or joining one, where you can all read out loud together. It will really bring out the storylines so much better. If you don’t want to read with other people, you could always do what Dickens himself did and read in front of a mirror. No joke, the author would regularly act out his characters in front of his mirror so that he could see how well his character was forming!
This is also helped by doing the accents out loud. Sometimes, if you’re reading too formally in your mind, you can read a sentence which doesn’t seem to make any sense. For example, in Oliver Twist, Dickens writes about Mrs Mann, Oliver’s early guardian. He talks about how corrupt and horrible she was, but later on refers to Oliver being led along by his ‘benevolent protectress,’ which is obviously a good thing. Why this apparent contradiction? Because Dickens is being sarcastic! He’s making a joke with us as the reader. So whenever you come up against an awkward sentence, or a phrase which doesn’t seem to sit well, try saying it sarcastically and you may find you’re being let in on a 180 year old joke.
One of the most brilliant things about Dickens is the fact that he really paints a picture. He describes in colourful detail what people were eating, what the smells were, what the sights were like. To really immerse yourself into the book, why not create a situation as you’re reading. Pour yourself a gin and water with a sugar lump while reading Oliver Twist, or else open a window and let the breeze wash over you as you begin Great Expectations on the Thames Estuary marshes.
London’s population exploded in the 19th century, from a million people in 1800 to over five million in 1900. Many of these new Londoners were poor immigrants from the countryside seeking work, and huge numbers of them ended up living in the city slums. Hot, overcrowded, with little running water or sanitation, the sheer stink of unwashed bodies, tobacco smoke, horses and garbage would have been horrendous.
But worse still was the smell which came from the river Thames. There was no effective plumbing in London until the 1860s. Before that, all toilet waste, animal carcasses, butchers remains and general filth was thrown into the river.
In 1858 the summer got so hot that the river water levels dropped significantly, leaving huge banks of sludgy waste in its place, stinking in the summer heat. Even Queen Victoria was affected. She tried to enjoy a river cruise but abandoned the idea when they reached the river and smelt the almighty stench.
Dickens wrote to a friend complaining “I can certify that the offensive smells, even in that short whiff, have been of a most head-and-stomach-distending nature.”
Parliament - itself built along the river edge - debated whether to flee to Oxford or St Albans to escape the miasma. In fact it was this summer, nicknamed the Great Stink, which eventually prompted the government to invest in a proper sewage network.
As the capital of the largest Empire in global history, London was a place of importance. Most British aristocratic families maintained properties in the city, which were especially used during the ‘London Season,’ a period in the summer when it was customary for the wealthy to come to the city for social events, such as Trooping of the Colour and the races at Epsom and Ascot. Many of the grand hotels and public buildings today began their life as the private homes of the rich, including the grandiose Somerset House.
Running alongside this vast wealth, however, was an extreme poverty. We might think of locations such as Whitechapel in the East End as being places of dire need, but in fact slums could be found everywhere, often running right alongside the homes of the wealthy. Take Charles Dickens’s quote from Little Dorrit regarding Covent Garden, “a place where there was a mighty theatre, showing wonderful and beautiful sights to richly-dressed ladies and gentlemen,” but also a place where, “miserable children in rags.. like young rats, slunk and hid, fed on offal huddled together for warmth and were hunted about…”
Even today we use the slang word ‘dosshouse’ to mean a filthy or untidy place. In the Victorian times though, the dosshouse was a very real place. With many new people arriving in the city every day, or else being driven from their slum homes by crime or eviction. The dosshouse was a Victorian version of a hostel. They were usually made up of a single, large room in which you could pay for a small cot for the night. You could pay extra for a little food, or, if you wanted to save money, you could refuse a cot and instead opt for the hangover.
The hangover was a large bench placed against the wall. You would sit on the bench and a rope would be tied across your front which you could hang over in order to sleep. This was a very cheap option, usually costing only a penny a night. The hangover would leave you feeling pretty rough, and was often used by people who got too drunk to go home, which is how the word has come to be associated with ‘the night after.’
Life could be very harsh for women who gave birth outside of marriage. In 1834 the Poor Laws officially absolved the fathers of having any responsibility over their illegitimate children. Women could no longer sue the fathers for financial assistance. The inevitable result of this change was that many mothers and children died from starvation or from disease as they sunk into poverty.
As a result of this desperation, Baby Farms emerged as a place for mothers to leave their children. Some women would leave their children to be raised by the ‘farmer’ in return for a series of regular payments. These were often horrible places, in which the farmers would starve the children in their care to maximise their profits. There are countless children who died from starvation and neglect at the hands of the ‘farmers’ and all the while the mothers believed they were paying for their child’s welfare.
For those who were even more desperate, they could pay to have a ‘farmer’ adopt their child. The fees were higher, and there was an understanding that the mother would never see the child again. It was heartbreakingly common for the adopters to simply kill the child, either through slow starvation, or simply through outright murder, in order to pocket the adoption fee. A number of ‘farmers’ were caught and prosecuted for infanticide and yet no regulation was passed to control or restrict Baby Farms until 1872.The last prosecution against a baby farmer for infanticide was in 1907.
Yet the horrors of the Baby Farms were well known. Charles Dickens was condemning them in Oliver Twist as early as 1838, and the horrible reality is that most people in London were fully aware of the practices of the farms, they simply chose to ignore it.
Even an iconic London writer such as Dickens had a rather dim view of the capital, “London is shabby by daylight and shabbier by gaslight.” And ,”Old iron and fried fish, cough drops and artificial flowers, boiled pigs feet and household furniture that looks as if it were polished up with lip-salve.”
In fact, London was grimy from the heavy coal pollution, so much so, that many Londoners opted to wear black simply to hide the dirt. There was one place where you could find colour and escapism though, and that was the music hall.
These were not as respectable as theatres. They were full of smoke and noise. Spectators would eat and drink and laugh while the performers tried to entertain. “They are invariably numerous and splendid in precise proportion to the dirt and poverty of the surrounding neighbourhood,” wrote Dickens.
It was very common for performers who failed to entertain to be pelted with rotten vegetables, or even dead animals. Some music halls actually had to erect cages around the stage to protect the performers, while someone was usually employed to stand on the edge of the platform with a big hook to drag weak performers off the stage.
But rowdy, noisy and garish they may be, they offered a dazzling break to the otherwise bleakness of Victorian poverty. The influence of the music halls is still with us today, in popular ditties such as “Daisy, Daisy, Give me your Answer Do” and “Oh, We do like to live beside the Seaside.”
In fact, noisy, shabby and chaotic it may have been, but London inspired Dickens. He wrote, "a day in London sets me up again and starts me." and referred to the city as his 'magic lantern.'
Very few people drank water on its own. Although improvements had been made in sanitation in the 19th century, water supplies were still uncertain and unreliable. In fact, although various parish authorities tried to introduce water pumps in the 1830s, they often faced hostility by the local middle class families who were worried that water pumps might cause the poor to congregate near their properties.
Because of all this, most people opted to drink alcohol instead. Dickens recorded that the working class in particular would scorn beer and mild alcohols in favour of gin. By 1840 London was consuming 10 litres of gin per person per year. To Dickens, there was a direct parallel between the miserable poverty experienced by the poor and their desire for strong drink, “If temperance societies would suggest an antidote against hunger, filth, and foul air… gin-palaces would be numbered among the things that were.”
Even in the early 19th century, London was an incredibly diverse city. Remember that this was a city which dominated world trade and politics, which meant people came here from every corner of the globe. Cartoons and sketches by George Cruikshank, a satirical illustrator who often collaborated with Dickens, captured many real and imagined scenes of London life.
Although the cartoons themselves often portray racist stereotypes of the time, they also depict a city in which diversity is a normal part of everyday life for ordinary Londoners. People of all races are portrayed drinking and dancing, cuddling and fighting alongside each other. In fact there were approximately 10,000 people of African heritage in the UK at the turn of the 19th century.
There were also a number of people from European countries: huge numbers of Irish and Italian Catholics alongside German and French Protestants. Nor was London wholly Christian, with a number of Jewish people having been resident in the city from the 17th century and a rising number of Muslims arriving particularly with the lascar sailors of the East India Company. In fact, London opened its very first Indian restaurant in 1810, the Hindoostanee Coffee House.
There was no legal obligation to send your children to school until 1880. Before that, there were a number of ways people could get an education, whether that be through a charitable school for the poor (these were often referred to as ragged schools), or through a religious school system. There were big arguments between these groups and the government as to how best to educate the country.
The Victorian middle class did not like the idea of the government interfering in peoples private lives (and education was seen as the responsibility of the parents, not the state), while there were also debates about whether schooling should encourage the Church of England as a faith, or whether schools should be affiliated with various faith groups, including Catholics and Non Conformists. They also had big debates about who should pay for the education system. While these arguments raged, generation after generation went uneducated.
In truth though, in the slums, not many people saw the value in a schooled education. This was an age when children were sent to work in factories, as apprentices or to sell goods on the streets. If parents opted to send their children to school then they would lose that income. It’s also worth remembering that there were very different expectations for different classes. If you worked on the docks, in the factories or as a pedlar, you probably wouldn’t see the value in being able to read or write, certainly not enough to justify pulling out of work.
In fact it was so difficult for the authorities to convince the poor of the need to send their children to school, that a law was passed requiring every child employed under the age of 13 to carry a certificate to prove they had received an adequate amount of schooling. School meals were also introduced as a way of offsetting some of the lost income that poor families had to face by sending their children to school. Even as late as 1870 it is estimated that half of all British children had no access to schooling at all.
Many people lived desperately in Victorian London. There was an almost constant need for cheap food and in an age with little to no regulation, this left the poorest people vulnerable to food which had been tampered with.
Tea could be mixed with ash or even lead as a way of maximising the profits of the producers. Flour was often mixed with chalk or even lime, which was not only horrible but potentially lethal too. Certain meats were also highly suspect, especially minced meats such as sausages. Sometimes they were mixed with breadcrumbs to stretch the meat further – there are some genuine complaints from this period that sausages would turn to toast when cooked. Others were mixed with rotten meats or gristle, which could both make you sick and would taste vile. The Victorian Londoners even began to refer to sausages as Bags o’Mystery since you never knew what you were going to get.
Worst of all though was the sweets. Most people in the slums would have eaten sweets only very rarely as a treat, they did not have the disposable income to spare. But while sweets may have tasted good, they were often heavily laced with chemicals to create the bright colours, including plaster of Paris, copper, lead and even mercury. On at least one instance arsenic was added to them, causing a number of people to die from the poison.
London, for most of the 19th century, was a filthy place. First of all there was the smog. Thick clouds of coal dust and ash which wafted down onto the city. This was not just in the poor areas either: even Buckingham Palace was heavily blackened by the smog and began to crumble. Londoners began to call the heaviest smogs ‘pea-soupers’ owing to the greenish hue which often coloured the smoke.
One great example of just how heavy the smog was is Downing Street. Downing Street is famous for its black brickwork, however the street is actually built out of a yellowish stone. It is only the years and years of smog which had coloured the street black. (Although in the modern era they have to paint the houses).
The polluted air brought with it a plethora of medical ailments such as asthma and bronchitis, as well as deaths and injuries from accidents - crossing the road could be dangerous when the smog was so dense.
You might think – and certainly Victorian Londoners did think – that the best thing to do during a thick smog was to stay safe at home with the windows barred shut. The problem was the Victorian home itself was riddled with hazards, including the houses of the middle class.
For a start, lead was put into almost everything. Even paint and wallpaper was often created with lead, meaning that if you were sat in your home with the windows shut, you would be slowly poising yourself. Lead was also put into the paint on children’s toys, and when you remember that children often put their toys in their mouth, it had a horrific effect. Not only are there a number of records of people suffering from lost teeth or gum disease – both caused by too much exposure to lead – there are a heart breaking number of deaths, particularly among children, from lead poisoning. Eventually the use of lead was controlled and restricted, however it would continue to be used in UK paint until 1992.
]]>Dickens understood the importance of illustrations in a book and found inventive ways to include them in editions of his novels. In this video, join Curator Louisa Price as she shows you a woodblock of John Leech’s famous illustration, ‘Mr. Fezziwig’s Ball’ – the only illustration to be used in Dickens’s 1852 cheap edition of his Christmas stories.
This video is the third in a series of six videos celebrating our special exhibition, Beautiful Books: Dickens and the Business of Christmas. The first video can be found here and the second here.
Louisa Price has been Curator at the Charles Dickens Museum, London since 2014. She specialises in nineteenth and twentieth century social history collections. Prior to the Dickens Museum she worked at The Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, The Museum of The Home and the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum.
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In the 1800s there was an evolution in the world of book binding, taking us from leather and casings to the first cloth bound books that we’re now very familiar with. In this video, join guest Curator Prof. Simon Eliot as he explains these developments at a pivotal time in the world of publishing.
This video is the second in a series of five videos celebrating our special exhibition, Beautiful Books: Dickens and the Business of Christmas. The first video can be found here.
Simon Eliot is Professor Emeritus of the History of the Book at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. He was involved in founding the Reading Experience Database (RED); the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP); and London Rare Books School. He has published on quantitative book history, publishing history, history of lighting, library history, and the history of reading. He was General Editor of the new four-volume History of Oxford University Press (2013-17); and recently directed a large-scale AHRC-funded project on the communication history of the Ministry of Information 1939-46.
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Dickens understood the importance of the ‘look of a book’ and when he wrote A Christmas Carol in 1843 he had a plan - not only for words - but also for the volume’s design. In this video, join Curator Louisa Price as she shows you a rare trail edition of the Carol.
This video is the first in a series of six videos celebrating our special exhibition, Beautiful Books: Dickens and the Business of Christmas.
Louisa Price has been Curator at the Charles Dickens Museum, London since 2014. She specialises in nineteenth and twentieth century social history collections. Prior to the Dickens Museum she worked at The Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, The Museum of The Home and the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum.
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Charles Dickens was always on the move. A restless traveller, he toured Italy, France, Switzerland and America in his lifetime and had plans to go much further. Dickens however was also a writer of home and cosy fireside values. In this video, Professor John explores Dickens’s ‘doubleness’ in these contradictions, and his use of a portable writing desk.
This video is the third in a series of three videos celebrating our special exhibition, Global Dickens: For Every Nation Upon Earth. The first video can be found here and the second here.
Professor Juliet John is Head of the School of Humanities and Hildred Carlile Chair of English Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her work has focused predominantly on the relationship between Dickens's work and the popular cultural contexts of the Victorian and post-Victorian periods and her books include 'Dickens and Mass Culture' (Oxford University Press 2010), and 'Dickens and Modernity' (English Association, 2012). Her article on ‘Dickens’s Global Art’ (E-rea, 13.2 (2016) was formative in the co-curation of the Global Dickens exhibition.
]]>After Dickens’s death in 1870, his stories travelled to every corner of the globe. Join Professor Juliet John as she tells the story of an extraordinary copy of David Copperfield that went to Antarctica and back with Captain Scott’s men on the ill-fated Terra Nova expedition.
This video is the second in a series of three videos celebrating our special exhibition, Global Dickens: For Every Nation Upon Earth. The first video can be found here.
Professor Juliet John is Head of the School of Humanities and Hildred Carlile Chair of English Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her work has focused predominantly on the relationship between Dickens's work and the popular cultural contexts of the Victorian and post-Victorian periods and her books include 'Dickens and Mass Culture' (Oxford University Press 2010), and 'Dickens and Modernity' (English Association, 2012). Her article on ‘Dickens’s Global Art’ (E-rea, 13.2 (2016) was formative in the co-curation of the Global Dickens exhibition.
]]>Hans [Christian] Andersen slept in this room for five weeks – which seemed to the family AGES!
So declared a note which Charles Dickens pinned up in his house at Gad’s Hill Place in Kent in July 1857, shortly after Andersen’s visit (1). He was originally only meant to stay with the family for a fortnight at the most. Yet Andersen was “a bony bore, and stayed on and on”, recalled Dickens’s daughter Katey (2).
A souvenir of their friendship resides in the Study here at 48 Doughty Street: it is a copy of Dickens’s book The Chimes which he presented to Andersen ten years earlier. It is a most extraordinary book with an exquisite covering and a beautifully simple and engaging dedication:
Hans Christian Andersen From his friend and admirer Charles Dickens London Jul 1847
'The Chimes' by Charles Dickens Museum dedicated to Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Dickens Museum Collection
As a Volunteer Room Steward at the Museum, I recently had the singular opportunity of taking it out of the case with the Curator and closely inspecting it for myself. Holding it in my hands, it was hard to believe that the giver and the recipient were who they are said to be. Yet there was still something special about the book which almost made me feel as if it were one of my own from childhood – one of those long forgotten yet not quite so distant memories which have been tucked away on the bookshelf.
Dickens and Andersen are two of my favourite writers. Sadly, the book is the remnant of their fraught relationship. It is a dreadful shame when one thinks of how differently things might have been.
Hans Christian Andersen
But, when Andersen came to stay with the Dickens family in 1857, he had annoyed them right from the start by announcing on the first morning of his visit that it was customary in Denmark for male guests to be shaved by one of the sons of the house. In response Dickens arranged a daily appointment for him with a local barber in Rochester (3).
Andersen also deeply baffled the family when, upon receiving a bad review of one of his books during his visit, he threw himself face down on the lawn and wept inconsolably (4)
When watching Dickens perform his play The Frozen Deep, Andersen was thoroughly pleased to find out from his host that Queen Victoria – who was in the audience with Prince Albert – was aware of his presence (5). Yet Andersen became moody during the party that followed because he was not the centre of attention (6).
Dickens was not wholly unpleasant to Andersen, though it is obvious that he had had enough of him when the time finally came for his departure. Andersen sensed tension in the air before taking his leave and sought solace from him, almost as a child might from a parent (7). Dickens was comparatively civil, though when Andersen returned home he received only one final letter. It had a particularly icy tone of condescension and farewell.
There is no denying that Andersen was a challenging guest. He experienced lifelong social awkwardness, enclosed in his own world, identifying with the characters in his work.
If you have not yet read The Ugly Duckling, Andersen’s book for children, I would strongly recommend it (though I am sure many of you already have). I can recall a Ladybird version of it from when I was small, filled with enchanting illustrations, nearly all of which had a dark, murky, foggy background in them. I never suspected then that Andersen viewed the work as his autobiographical story (8), though the tale did always seem to have a certain poignancy about it.
'The Ugly Duckling' by Hans Christian Andersen
Some speculate the story was inspired by a particularly painful episode from his youth. At the age of 14, Andersen left Odense, the city of his birth, and arrived in Copenhagen with the dream of becoming an opera singer. But he was mockingly described as “lanky and awkward, with a big nose, huge hands and feet and a poor crackly voice”. His dream was shattered and he was overcome with sorrow (9).
However, he would later outstrip those who mocked him when he became the famous and much-loved author of fairy tales who wrote:
I never dreamt that so much happiness was possible when I was the Ugly Duckling!
Hans Christian Andersen, The Ugly Duckling
Ann Philippas is an illustrator graduate. She is a Support Worker at the Ladbroke Grove Autism Centre and a Volunteer Floor Steward at the Charles Dickens Museum.
1. Gladys Storey, Dickens and Daughter (Frederick Muller Ltd, 1939).
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Ben Maggs is an antiquarian book dealer who has worked for Maggs Bros. since 2013. Established in 1853 in London by Uriah Maggs, Maggs Bros. Ltd. is one of the world’s largest antiquarian booksellers.
‘The Old Curiosity Shop’ sits at 14 Portsmouth Street, on the south-western corner of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It is a quaint wood-beamed cottage, with an upper floor that slightly overhangs the pavement, like a piece of Tudor England dropped into the twenty-first century. It may well be one of the oldest surviving buildings in central London and has been a place of literary pilgrimage for Dickensians since the 1880s. The masonry bears an inscription in Gothic lettering:
It is also, frankly, something of a fake.
Of course, this peculiar old building was known to Charles Dickens. It was near to the Insolvency Debtors Court which features in The Pickwick Papers and Little Dorrit; and it sits within the legal quarter of London portrayed in Bleak House. One can even glimpse Portsmouth Street from the chambers in Lincoln’s Inn Fields that once belonged to John Forster, Dickens’s friend and lawyer. Nonetheless, there is nothing within the book The Old Curiosity Shop (published in 1840), nor in Dickens’s correspondence, which suggests this was the ‘original’ of Dickens’s antique shop (several other sites have been suggested over the years). Dickens’s novel concludes with the author stating, that the titular shop ‘had long been pulled down, and a fine broad road was in its place’ – which one might think would settle the matter. And yet, in the late-Victorian and Edwardian era, this was the venue for visiting tourists, hoping to glimpse ‘Dickens’s London’.
How, then, did this place become so well-known?
There is every reason to trust a letter by Charles Tesseyman, which was published in the Echo, a popular London evening paper, on 31 December 1883:
"My brother, who occupied No.14 Portsmouth-street between 1868 and 1877, the year of his decease, had the words ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’ placed over the front for purely business purposes, as likely to attract custom to his shop, he being a dealer in books, paintings, old china, &c. Before 1868 – that is, before my brother had the words put up – no suggestion had ever been made that the place was the veritable ‘Old Curiosity Shop’ immortalised in Dickens."
But, even as Tesseyman made this admission, it was already too late. The sign had been noticed by an American journalist, B.E. Martin, who published a literary tour of Dickens’s London in Scribner’s Monthly in May 1881. Martin admitted the connection to Dickens was ‘a fable … a pleasing delusion’, but the article nonetheless contained a sketch of the quaint old building – and tourists soon began to search for it. When Martin published his article, the shop did not even possess the second assertive line of writing, ‘Immortalised by Charles Dickens’ (the text was ‘The Old Curiosity Shop: Dealer in Works of Art’, as shown in a painting from 1879). But growing numbers of American tourists began to appear in Portsmouth Street and ‘Immortalized by Charles Dickens’ was added for good measure. This was probably the work of H. Poole, a dealer in waste paper, who owned the property in the 1880s and 1890s.
The shop’s celebrity dramatically increased in late-1883, when a series of press articles reported that it was under threat of demolition, after a neighbouring building had partially collapsed. The Daily Telegraph inaccurately claimed that the site was ‘long popularly identified with the “Old Curiosity Shop”’ and noted the irony of the threat of demolition coming at such a season (‘of all times in the year, seeing what DICKENS did for Christmas’). American collectors of Dickensiana were purportedly ‘quite ready to purchase the ruins, and fix them up in Boston or Philadelphia’, while others demanded loose bricks as mementoes. Such was the shop’s new-found fame that a stage version of The Old Curiosity Shop, scripted by Charles Dickens Jnr., already in pre-production at the Opera Comique hastily introduced and advertised a painting of the Portsmouth Street shop as the backdrop to one of the scenes. Meanwhile, more reporters, sketch artists and photographers lined up outside to record this piece of ‘Dickens’s London’ before it vanished.
And yet it never did.
The building did not collapse like the neighbouring property, nor was it swallowed up by subsequent nearby improvement works, which created the Parisian-style boulevards of Kingsway and Aldwych (although said works did destroy the genuine ‘original’ of Poll Sweedlepipe’s barber shop, from Martin Chuzzlewit, on nearby Kingsgate Street). Rather, the media hype, and subsequent guidebooks and articles, simply attracted more and more tourists. The building’s timbered exterior was also a good fit with the Victorians’ growing fascination with the Elizabethan Age. By the early 1900s there were ‘waggonettes laden with visitors … constantly arriving to see the curious little house’. The shop sold a variety of Dickens souvenirs, from postcards to presentation copies of Dickens’s complete works (which were shipped back to the United States for American tourists, to greet them on their return home). The shop became the place for Dickensian tourism; its authenticity was almost irrelevant – everyone went there and it had become emblematic of ‘Dickens’s London’.
By the 1930s, ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’ was essentially a Dickens-themed gift and general antiques shop, aimed at tourists (with a sister gift-shop beside Anne Hathaway’s cottage at Stratford-upon-Avon). Though the shop itself was never bought up by wealthy Americans, there was a full-size recreation at the ‘Merrie England’ display at the Chicago ‘Century of Progress’ Exposition in 1933, and at several subsequent American expositions. Literary tourists now find that the shop sells unusual designer shoes, not Dickensian merchandise.
Old Curiosity Shop Commemorative Mustard Pot and Certificate,
DH859 © Charles Dickens Museum
The trade in Dickens memorabilia was abandoned in the 1990s when the local authority forbade Lincoln’s Inn Fields to coach parties (the modern equivalent of ‘waggonettes laden with visitors’). But tourists still come in dribs and drabs and ‘The Old Curiosity Shop: Immortalized by Charles Dickens’ now appears on Instagram or Twitter instead of picture postcards – and it still looks the part.
Lee Jackson is an author and historian, well-known for his website of primary sources www.victorianlondon.org, his guide to 'Walking Dickens’ London' (2012), 'Dirty Old London' (Yale, 2014) and 'Palaces of Pleasure' (Yale, 2019) examining nineteenth century mass entertainment. He is currently pursuing a PhD on ‘Dickensland’.
]]>The 1800s met the popularity of literacy and demand for new books with the invention of the revolutionary business of circulating, or lending, libraries. Join bookseller Alice Rowell to discover the story of the beginnings of the Maggs Bros. told through the earliest piece of ephemera held in their collection.
This video is the sixth in a series of six videos celebrating our special exhibition, Beautiful Books: Dickens and the Business of Christmas. The first video can be found at here, the second here, third here, fourth here and fifth here.
Alice Rowell is an antiquarian book dealer who has worked for Maggs Bros. since 2012. She specialises in autograph letters, archives and modern books, and has a particular love for the literature and art of the 19th Century. Established in 1853 in London by Uriah Maggs, Maggs Bros. Ltd. is one of the world’s largest antiquarian booksellers.
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I hope searching the site brings you some of the enjoyment we as staff feel when poking around the storeroom and rifling in boxes; whether it’s the shock of looking closely at a Dickens character figurine to discover it’s made with real hair or the thrill when turning the page of a book from Dickens’s own library, to see his own annotations.
There is a real charm to small institutions like the Dickens Museum with its cosy interiors and storage areas reminiscent of The Old Curiosity Shop, all managed by a small team and supported by enthusiastic volunteers. Yet it is these characteristics that mean creating a database of the Museum’s holdings is no easy feat.
A recent photograph of the Dickens Museum curators beginning their weekly dust and check of the store…or more accurately: Watercolour of 'The Old Curiosity Shop' by George Cattermole, 1840 (DH98)
When the Museum opened its doors in 1925, it received donations from a variety of individuals (two significant acquisitions were the collections of B.W. Matz and Frederick George Kitton). Despite a period of closure during World War Two, the Museum continued to collect objects as well as publications and archive material from home and abroad. By the 2000s the Museum was crammed full of treasures - the library was in what is now the kitchen, and various display cabinets also doubled as storage units throughout the historic house.
Scenes of the Dickens Museum interior, 1925-1930s.
From 1925 to the 1970s, the building and collections were cared for by a librarian, subsequent house custodians and eventually after the Second Wold War, its first curator. The handful of Museum staff were supported by volunteers from the Dickens Fellowship. From the 2000s, steps were taken to bring the Museum in line with modern professional standards in collections care and in 2011 it gained Accreditation (the UK industry standard in Museum and Gallery practice).
Museum staff and volunteers ensuring the building’s safety during the Second World War.
In 2012, the £3.1 million HLF project, Great Expectations allowed the Museum to expand and improve its facilities meaning better storage and display spaces for its collections. One of the last things we purchased for the project was collections management software by System Simulations Ltd. which, amongst other things, allows us to make our database available to the public.
For the last six years, we have been working hard to draw together the Museum’s various historical catalogues into a single system, as well as trawling through the stores, checking, inventorying and photographing items in anticipation of making more of what we hold available for the public to search and see.
Historically, curators have been the gatekeepers of Museum collections, carefully managing what visitors and researchers could access. Increasingly, curators are charged with creating spaces where the public can be in control, search for themselves, make their own discoveries, draw connections and find the stories that interest them. Collections Online is part of that shift and we are excited to see how it will be used by Dickens fans and scholars across the world.
With the Museum estimated to have over 100,000 items in its care, we know we have a lot more work to do but with the help of a team of volunteers, slowly but surely, we will get more of our treasures uploaded there for you to explore.
Louisa Price has been Curator at the Charles Dickens Museum, London since 2014. She specialises in nineteenth and twentieth century social history collections. Prior to the Dickens Museum she worked at The Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, The Museum of The Home and the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum.
]]>As book lovers, we all know the saying that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover but as this video shows us, it’s hard to never judge a book by its cover when it’s a Sangorski and Sutcliffe binding. Join bookseller Ben Maggs of Maggs Bros as he shares with us two beautifully bound books by the master binders featuring gold tooling, inlay inscriptions, and even precious stones.
This video is the fifth in a series of six videos celebrating our special exhibition, Beautiful Books: Dickens and the Business of Christmas. The first video can be found here, second here, third here and fourth here.
Ben Maggs is an antiquarian book dealer who has worked for Maggs Bros. since 2013. Established in 1853 in London by Uriah Maggs, Maggs Bros. Ltd. is one of the world’s largest antiquarian booksellers.
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This video is the fourth in a series of six videos celebrating our special exhibition, Beautiful Books: Dickens and the Business of Christmas. The first video can be found here, second here and third here.
Simon Eliot is Professor Emeritus of the History of the Book at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. He was involved in founding the Reading Experience Database (RED); the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP); and London Rare Books School. He has published on quantitative book history, publishing history, history of lighting, library history, and the history of reading. He was General Editor of the new four-volume History of Oxford University Press (2013-17); and recently directed a large-scale AHRC-funded project on the communication history of the Ministry of Information 1939-46.
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‘Marongiu’s taste for humorous and even caricatured images is indulged to the fill in this cycle, which interprets the cheerfully picaresque and libertarian spirit of Dickens’s novel’ 1
In 2019, the Charles Dickens Museum lent 262 illustrations of Charles Dickens’s first novel, The Pickwick Papers, to the MAN Museum in Sardinia. The illustrations were created by a then virtually unknown artist, Anna Marongiu.
Born in 1907 in Cagliari, Sardinia, Anna Marongiu showed a natural talent for narrative drawing from childhood. A very technically skilled artist, Marongiu used engraving, drawing and watercolours to great effect in her work, using her abilities to express places, people and above all characters with great emotive ability. Her characterful drawings became increasingly more accomplished, and by her mid 30s she was exhibiting her artwork in galleries in Sardinia. These shows included a retrospective solo exhibition at the Galleria Palladino located in the island’s capital, Cagliari, in 1938. Her life was cut tragically short when she died in a plane crash in 1941. Her home was destroyed during the Second World War, which almost erased all physical traces of the young artist, and this destruction of her archive coupled with her premature death has meant that until recently her work was all but almost forgotten.
From her surviving works, it seems Marongiu enjoyed illustrating dynamic crowd scenes, like circuses, and masterpieces of literature, such as William Shakespeare’s, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and, most importantly for this blog, Charles Dickens’s, The Pickwick Papers.
Anna Marongiu, 1928 illustrations, including a colour illustration showing Mr Pickwick receiving a letter from Dodson and Fogg, a sketched scene of Mrs Pott fainting in to the arms of her maid and another of Sam Weller. (DH774.1, Charles Dickens Museum collection)
Marongiu created the 262 illustrations for The Pickwick Papers between 1928 and 1929, an enormous number considering these images only cover the first half of the story. Dickens scholar Michael Hollington has theorized that the translation of the novel it’s known Marongiu was working from was probably published in two volumes, so it’s possible she only had the first one in her possession. It’s also possible that she planned to return to The Pickwick Papers and finish her illustrations at another time, but sadly we will never know.
The illustrations seemingly were not commissioned and were never published, indeed no publisher at the time would have printed roughly 10 illustrations per chapter in the novel. So why did Marongiu take the time to produce so many works based on this Dickens novel? The Pickwick Papers, with its comic adventures, coming of age story, and darker, more gothic aspects all clearly appealed to the young artist, so perhaps these works were a passion project, created for the love of the novel.
Anna Marongiu, 1928 illustrations, including colour illustrations of the Pickwick Club assembled and another of Mr Tupman in full brigand’s costume. (DH774.28, Charles Dickens Museum collection)
Most volumes of The Pickwick Papers published in English still use the original illustrations, but Marongiu joins a wealth of European illustrators to reinterpret Dickens’s stories. Even though her drawings were never published alongside the text, she is virtually unique in the history of Dickens illustrators due to the volume of illustrations created for one story but also the diversity of scenes she chose to illustrate. Marongiu was equally talented when it came to expressing the comedic, bright and joyful parts of the story, and the dark, gothic and haunting portions. Her work pulls the reader into the story, at times joyfully and times eerily, in the same way that Dickens’s words do.
Anna Marongiu, 1928 illustrations, including a colour illustration of Mr Tupman on his knee to Rachael, as well as character sketches of Tupman, Winkle and Snodgrass. (DH774.3, Charles Dickens Museum collection)
Anna Marongiu’s beautiful illustrations were donated to the Charles Dickens Museum in 1985 by her family. We know that the idea of an exhibition around her works was discussed in the late 1980s, but for unknown reasons it never materialised. While some of the illustrations were exhibited in 1938 as part of her solo exhibition, the retrospective exhibition at MAN in Nuoro, Sardinia, is the first time The Pickwick Papers series has been displayed together in its entirety.
While the exhibition has now closed and the artworks are safely back in the collections store at the Charles Dickens Museum in London, the exhibition lives on through online content, the beautiful exhibition catalogue (available online) and future research sparked by the MAN exhibition.
Short Film produced by Sardinia Film Commission Foundation in partnership with the MAN museum of Nuoro.
Emma Treleaven is the Assistant Curator at the Charles Dickens Museum. Her specialties include 20th century fashion and experimental making research methodologies. Prior to the Charles Dickens Museum, she worked at the Victoria and Albert Museum on the Dior: Designer of Dreams exhibition and at Bletchley Park.
1 Luigi Fassi, ‘Anna Marongiu: Story of a Rediscovery’, Anna Marongiu, Italy: Marsilio, 2019
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PART 2: ‘Not the republic of my imagination’
After the heady excitement of the Boz Ball at the Park Theatre, Dickens spent the rest of February 1842 exploring New York. He was horrified by certain aspects and institutions of the city such as the savage squalor of the slum area called the Five Points and the menacing Tombs Prison. He was equally disturbed by the solitary confinement prison in Philadelphia and distinctly unimpressed by what he saw of the United States government in action in Washington where ‘Dishonest Faction’ seemed to stare from every corner of the House of Representatives assembly hall. The U.S.A. was not, he lamented in a letter to William MacCready, ‘the Republic I came to see’, nor ‘the Republic of my imagination’.
Dickens would go onto write about the plight of prisoners in 'American Notes.' This illustration ‘The Solitary Prisoner’ by Marcus Stone and engraved by E. Dalziel was published in the 1874 Illustrated Library Edition of the book. ([lib]1065, Charles Dickens Museum collection)
Brought face to face with slavery in all its brutal reality in Richmond, Virginia, Dickens found the situation so horrible that he cut short plans to go as far south as Charleston and decided instead that he and Catherine should travel some 2,000 miles west to St Louis, to which city he had been invited as guest of honour at a public banquet.
Part of the journey to St Louis involved travelling on a steamboat on the Mississippi (‘that hideous river’ as he called it) but he continued to look in vain for that ‘sublimity’ of natural scenery which he had so eagerly anticipated finding in America. Nor did he find this in the vaunted vistas of the famed Looking Glass Prairie which he visited from St. Louis and thought less impressive than Salisbury Plain. He did not discover the sublimity he was seeking, in fact, until he and Catherine reached Niagara Falls the grandeur of which he found quite overwhelming (unlike Catherine’s phlegmatic English maid who was also of the travelling party; it was, she said, ‘only water and too much of that’).
Illustration of the steamer ‘Messenger’ on which Dickens sailed from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati. From W.G. Wilkins ‘Charles Dickens in America', 1911. ([lib]2968, Charles Dickens Museum collection)
From Niagara Dickens and Catherine made a brief excursion into Canada visiting Toronto, Kingston, Montreal and Quebec. In Montreal Dickens was delighted to discover the existence of an amateur dramatic company organised by the British garrison there. He organised, directed and acted in a highly successful two-night production of a programme of farces and was presented by the officers with a silver cup to commemorate the occasion.
This engraved cup was presented to Dickens by the officers of the British Garrison in Montreal in May 1842 in gratitude for his zeal in organising two highly successful evenings of farces performed by the Garrison Amateurs. (DH204, Charles Dickens Museum Collection)
This annotated playbill for the Queen’s Theatre Montreal 24 May 1842 features Dickens as the stage manager and his wife as one of the actresses alongside Officers of the Coldstream Guards in theatricals for the benefit of charity. The programme consisted of 'A Roland for an Oliver', an interlude called 'Past Two O'Clock in the Morning' and a farce called 'Deaf as a Post' (in which Catherine Dickens played). (DH766, Charles Dickens Museum Collection)
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This is the third of three short videos in which the celebrated expert explores the relationship between the animate and inanimate in Dickens’s private and published writing. The first video can be found here and the second here.
Professor Slater is a Fellow of Birkbeck University of London and Emeritus Professor in its Department of English and Humanities. He is one of the world’s most highly regarded Dickens scholars. He is a past President of the International Dickens Fellowship and of the Dickens Society of America, and former editor of ‘The Dickensian’. His internationally acclaimed books include Charles Dickens. A Life Defined by Writing (Yale UP, 2011), The Great Charles Dickens Scandal (Yale UP, 2012) and Dickens on America & The Americans (Edward Everett Root Publishers, September 2017).
]]>Marion Lloyd and Big Issue vendor Dave Martin
Exhibition openings are always wonderful occasions but imagine the delight when two of our ‘voices’ – Big Issue vendor Dave Martin and great-great-granddaughter of Dickens, Marion Lloyd – looked at each other and said ‘I know you!’
Marion explained: “Dave and I met some years ago at Hammersmith Tesco where I do my regular shopping. He has many friends who always stop and talk to him outside the store even if they don’t buy the Big Issue - there’s usually a queue! I acquired my terrier Eva last year and when she comes to Tesco with me. I always tie her up at Dave’s patch so he can keep an eye on her while I’m inside. He’s a dog-watcher for lots of local shoppers. Meeting him in the museum was an unexpected and delightful moment. And of course we are proper friends now.”
Restless Shadow: Dickens the Campaigner continues at the Charles Dickens Museum, 48 Doughty Street London WC1N 2LX until 29th October 2017.
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Queen Victoria’s Twelfth Cake, shown in the 'Illustrated London News', 1849. The cake was 30 inches across, gilded around its bowed sides, and displayed an elegant sugar-paste party enjoying a detailed sugar-paste picnic – a scene that provided a genteel antidote to the sort of riotousness the Queen disapproved of.
First recorded in England around 1570, by Pepys’s day it was a fully-fledged tradition; a leavened fruit cake, something like a cross between buttery Italian Panettone and modern Christmas cake; rich with the aroma of wealth and trade – cinnamon, cloves, mace and nutmeg. But what Pepys and his party are really interested in is what token they will get in their piece, for this is the character they get to play for the rest of the evening; a bean for the King, a pea for the Queen; perhaps, too, a clove for the knave, and a rag for the slut (the word having the seventeenth-century sense of ‘slovenly’ rather than our modern sense of ‘promiscuous’).
By the early nineteenth century, the bean and pea had evolved again to larger-than-life pantomime characters, printed onto cards. It was an opportunity for family theatrics and fun that hugely appealed to Dickens; he had happy memories of Twelfth Cakes and dancing at his school, before the terrible Marshalsea days, and delighted in recreating those lost joys for his own and friends’ children. Bean or no, Dickens was indubitably king of the Twelfth Night revels, recalled his daughter Mamie; he called on every one to join in the songs, recitations and theatricals; and “under his attentions the shyest child would brighten and become merry”.
The Victorian Twelfth Cake was no longer yeasted; all the air was beaten into the cake by the cook’s aching arm (as they were with all cakes until the miraculous raising agents later in the century). That magpie of social curiosities, William Hone, in his 1827 Every Day-Book describes them as “Dark with citron and plums and heavy as gold”; citrons are a sort of cross between a grapefruit and a lemon with added fragrance; ‘plums’ simply means dried fruit rather than specifically plums (as in ‘plum cake’).
Dickens’s friend Angela Burdett Coutts sent one to the family every year to mark both Twelfth Night and the birthday of her godson, Charley Dickens. Dickens once joked that it weighed ninety pounds. Many Twelfth Cakes are monsters; John Leech’s immortal illustration of the Ghost of Christmas present in A Christmas Carol, shows him with his foot resting upon one of the ‘immense twelfth cakes’, as though it were a white and pink pouffe.
Scrooge’s Third Visitor, the Ghost of Christmas Present, with his foot on one of the ‘immense twelfth cakes’ in the illustration by John Leech.
The ‘poor little Twelfth Cake’ in The Mystery of Edwin Drood earns Dickens’s pity for being rather ‘a Twenty-fourth Cake or a Forty-eighth Cake’. They need to be big, partly so everybody gets a treat and partly to have room for the confectioners to outdo each other in the intricacy of icing sugar decorations, made from the pliable Gum Tragacanth or Gum Dragon, coloured, supposedly, with natural dyes (though also poisonous mercury or copper). Hone describes them in the pastry-cooks’ windows, dazzling onlookers with their decorations of “Stars, castles, kings, cottages, dragons, trees, fish, palaces, cats, dogs, churches, lions, milkmaids, knights, serpents, and innumerable other forms, in snow-white confectionery, painted with variegated colours, glittering by ‘excess of light’, reflected from mirrors against the walls.”
William Hone reports that urchins would nail together the clothes of people admiring the Twelfth Cakes in front of the pastry cooks windows. ('The Everyday Book', 1825)
The impecunious Leigh Hunt, the original of Bleak House’s Harold Skimpole, shared Dickens’s understanding of how hunger could work on the imagination. ‘Even the little ragged boys, who stand at those shops by the hour, admiring the heaven within, and are destined to have none of it, get, perhaps, from imagination alone, a stronger taste of the beatitude, than many a richly-fed palate.’ It is hard to imagine, in our chocolate-obsessed twenty-first century, just how rare and exciting it was to have all the tastes in a rich fruit cake tumble over one another in the mouth – and how lucky we are to be able to afford them.
There was great pride in this British tradition and some bafflement that it hadn’t been exported. Thackeray, a frequent guest at Dickens’s Twelfth Night parties in London, finding himself in a ‘foreign city’ (Rome) in 1854, reported that ‘you could not even get a magic-lantern or buy Twelfth-Night characters’ for a children’s entertainment. Although many parts of France, Switzerland and Italy had – and still have – their own tradition of Epiphany cakes or King Cakes, they were not as grand as the Twelfth Cake which Angela Burdett-Coutts sent to the Dickens family when they were in Genoa in 1844/5. The local Swiss pastry-cook who was charged with the repair of a crack in its icing was so enchanted by it he showed it off to an eager group of townspeople. Dickens reported that ‘my good friend and servant who speaks all languages and knows none, renders it to the natives, pane dolce numero dodici – sweet bread number twelve’.
No Twelfth-Night party would be complete without the sort of ‘hot stuff from the jug’ that the Cratchits make merry with. In fruit-growing regions, wassail (warm, frothy beer with roast apples floating in it) was traditionally drunk to the health of the fruit trees on Twelfth Night and its association with the festival is recorded in Henry VII’s Household Ordinances; Dickens has it served at Dingley Dell at a Pickwickian Christmas. He had his own recipe for punch to make the cheeks glow; and the reformed Scrooge offers Bob Cratchit some expansive, post-Christmas Smoking Bishop, port mulled with spices and orange.
Dickens’s punch; he sent the recipe in a letter to a Mrs Fillonneau, promising it would make her ‘a beautiful Punchmaker in more senses than one’. Photography (c) CICO Books
After the diminution of Twelfth Night, the Twelfth Cake tokens, demoted to mere coins, strayed into the Christmas pud; the cake itself was downsized and billetted onto Christmas day although there’s no room there to accommodate it, and the night itself is marked by the gloom of taking down the Christmas decorations. This year, we should all defy Queen Victoria and modern capitalism. Make some hot stuff; invite Dickens in, along with some living friends and family. Accessorize your Christmas Cake with icing figures and slip some token in, play some games, forfeits, or act out a play… and welcome the Spirit of Twelfth Night past into your home.
Modernised recipes for Twelfth Cake, Smoking Bishop, Dickens’s punch and Wassail are in 'Dinner with Dickens' by Pen Vogler, available in the Museum shop.
Pen Vogler is a food historian and author of Dinner with Mr Darcy: Recipes inspired by the novels and letters of Jane Austen and Dinner with Dickens: Recipes Inspired by the Life and Works of Charles Dickens. Her day job is at Penguin books, where she edited Penguin’s Great Food series.
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Over the past two decades, the whole country had been undergoing a renaissance in the way in which Christmas was being celebrated – attributable in large part to the writings of Charles Dickens. In contrast, the author himself had been finding his own Christmases dwindling in enjoyment. The phenomenal success of A Christmas Carol in 1843 had changed his life. From that year onwards, he had become considered, by many of his readers, the embodiment of Christmas itself. This was encapsulated by the comment made by a child when the news of Dickens’s death had been announced: the poet Theodore Watts-Dunton was walking through London’s Covent Garden when he heard a little market girl ask “will Father Christmas die too?”. Ironically, for many years, the man who is credited with bringing back Britain’s Christmas spirit, found his own festive seasons to be a time of gruelling hard work, starting in the summer, when he had to begin planning the “Christmas number” of his magazine.
On 1 October 1866, Dickens wrote to his friend and editor W.H.Wills “I am still unapproachable on the general subject of Xmas Nos. myself – am lame – ferocious – and dangerous.” Three days later he wrote to Wilkie Collins, describing himself as being in the thick of “Christmas Labour”. As usual, he had taken on far too much work and, as was also very usual by this final decade of his life, his own Christmas had become a time, not of friends and family and feasting, but of work and exhaustion. Despite having said he would not to be able to write a Christmas story that year, he had succeeded in completing Mugby Junction. When he finished it, he was determined to reward himself by taking a proper break – he wanted to enjoy the kind of festive season he had written about in so many stories, but which had seemed so unattainable to him in recent years.
That year, Dickens planned a family Christmas at Gad’s Hill Place, his home in Kent, where he would be spending the full “twelve days of Christmas”. He also decided to hold a seasonal event for the public to enjoy, in the field opposite his house. As his daughter Mamie’s recollections show the idea was not happily received by his neighbours, but their fears came to nothing and the Christmas Sports proved a huge success. The author acted as “Judge and Referee”, his eldest son Charley was “Clerk of the Course” and their family friend and Christmas house guest, the artist Marcus Stone, was named as the “Starter”. There were ten events and these included running races, hurdles, long jump, high jump, a sack race, a three-legged race and a wheelbarrow race – the latter to be performed while blindfolded.
A few days later, Dickens wrote to his great friend, the actor William Charles Macready describing the day:
“You will be interested in knowing, that, encouraged by the success of Summer Cricket Matches, I got up a quantity of footraces and rustic sports in my field here on the 26th .... As I have never yet had a case of drunkenness, the landlord of the Falstaff had a drinking booth on the ground. All the Prizes I gave were in money too. We had two thousand people here. Among the crowd were soldiers, navvies, and labourers of all kinds. Not a stake was pulled up, or a rope slackened, or one farthing’s worth of damage done. To every competitor (only) a printed bill of general rules was given, with the concluding words: ‘Mr Dickens puts every man upon his honor [sic] to assist in preserving order’. There was not a dispute all day, and they went away at sunset rending the air with cheers, and leaving every flag on a 600 yards course, as neat as they found it when the gates were opened at 10 in the morning. Surely this is a bright sign in the neighbourhood of such a place as Chatham!”
Dickens’s eldest daughter, Mamie, estimated there were between two and three thousand people on the field “and by a kind of magical influence, my father seemed to rule every creature present to do his or her best to maintain order. The likelihood of things going wrong was anticipated, and despite the general prejudice of the neighbours against the undertaking, my father's belief and trust in his guests was not disappointed.”
On New Year’s Day Dickens wrote about it again, to his friend John Forster (who later became Dickens’s first biographer):
“The great mass of the crowd were labouring men of all kinds, soldiers, sailors, and navvies.... The road between this and Chatham was like a Fair all day; and surely it is a fine thing to get such perfect behaviour out of a reckless seaport town. Among other oddities we had A Hurdle Race for Strangers. One man (he came in second) ran 120 yards and leaped over ten hurdles in twenty seconds, with a pipe in his mouth, and smoking all the time. ‘If it hadn’t been for your pipe,’ I said to him at the winning-post, ‘you would have been the first’. ‘I beg your pardon, sir’, he answered, ‘but if it hadn’t been for my pipe, I should have been nowhere’.”
Lucinda Hawksley’s book Dickens and Christmas, published by Pen and Sword, is available to purchase online and in all good bookshops, including the shop at the Charles Dickens Museum.
]]>In this short video, Dr Leon Litvack explores the importance of Dickens’s reading desk, on display at the Charles Dickens Museum in London (dickensmuseum.com). Dickens had it specially made for his hugely successful late career as a solo performer of his own works.
Dr Litvack is Reader at the School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen’s University Belfast. He is Principal Editor of the Charles Dickens Letters Project and is working on the authoritative Clarendon critical edition of Dickens's last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, for Oxford University Press. His most recent book is On the Grass When I Arrive: An Anthology of New Writing from Northern Ireland on Place, Home and Belonging (Derry: Guildhall Press, 2016).
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Part IV - A Tale of Two Visits
‘The British Lion in America’, cartoon by Thomas Nast published in the New York 'Daily Joker,' 1868. (DH350, Charles Dickens Museum Collection)
In 1858 Dickens began a second, spectacularly successful, career as a public reader of his own works and after the end of the American Civil War came under great pressure to undertake a reading tour in the United States. This he did, under punishing weather conditions, in the winter of 1867/68, travelling as far south as Washington, as far west as Buffalo and as far north as Portland, Maine. He suffered from insomnia and a persistent bad cold and trouble with his feet (not helped by long walks in deep snow).
Reading desk used by Charles Dickens on his public reading tour of America, 1868. This desk was designed by Dickens and he was particular about its colour, as well as the placement of the tasselled fringe. He designed it so his audience would see as much of him as possible and he could perform with his whole body when giving his readings. (DH300, Charles Dickens Museum Collection)
Dickens was fortunate in the services of his excellent and resourceful manager George Dolby and in the devoted attention of his young American publisher James Fields, who, with his wife Annie, did great deal to provide Dickens with as much domestic comfort as possible during his arduous tour.
It was to divert and entertain Dickens, who was famously a passionate pedestrian, that Dolby and Fields organised the ‘Great International Walking Match’ on the outskirts of Boston on 29 February 1868, the contestants being Dolby himself and Fields’s junior partner James Osgood. Dickens, Dolby recorded in his Charles Dickens As I Knew Him (1885), ‘entered heartily into the scheme’, acted as trainer and co-umpire, and wrote a ‘sporting narrative’ of the match in the style of contemporary sporting newspapers.
The Great International Walking Match poster, February 1868 featuring a sporting narrative written by Dickens and signatures of all participants. (DH351, Charles Dickens Museum Collection)
Dickens’s American readings tour was a huge sell-out success. The huge profit (just under £20,000) that he had made from his American tour has been estimated to have amounted to between one quarter and one fifth of his total estate at death.
Tickets to public readings by Dickens in New York, 1868.
The tour culminated in a grand farewell banquet in New York at which Dickens made handsome amends for his earlier writings about the country, both fictional and non-fictional. He commented on the ‘amazing changes’ for the better in all aspects of the national life that he had witnessed in this his second visit and went on to pledge that a postscript should henceforth always be printed at the end of all new editions of American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit testifying to the immense improvements he had seen in American social and political life.
Stereopticon photograph of Charles Dickens taken 1867 in New York by J. Gurney & Son. Dickens is captured here in a stereopticon photograph which created an early form of a 3D image when viewed through a special device. (E198.1, Charles Dickens Museum Collection).
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Part III: any sensitive American
Back home by the end of June 1842, Dickens set to work on his contracted travel book and American Notes was published in October. Its harsh criticism of various aspects of American life, manners and politics gave great offence across the Atlantic and both Dickens himself and his book (pirated by American newspapers like all his books) were fiercely attacked in the American press. He resisted the temptation to make any public response, however, and began in the autumn the new full-length ‘novel of English life and manners’, to be published in twenty monthly numbers like Pickwick and Nickleby.
'American Notes' for 'General Circulation' was published in three volumes in 1842. Dickens dedicated the book to ‘'those friends of mine in America ... who, loving their country, can bear the truth when it is told good humouredly, and in a kind spirit'. John Forster has persuaded him to supress an introductory chapter which made mention of ‘any sensitive American’, suggesting he knew too well the strong responses the book would garner.
He had no intention of drawing on his American experiences in the new novel entitled The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit but, provoked by the response of the American press to his travel book and continuing attacks on himself in the American press, he changed his mind in the spring of 1843 and at the end of the fifth monthly number his hero, the aspiring architect young Martin Chuzzlewit, announces his intention of going to seek his fortune in the United States. He finds himself in a country full of swindlers and hypocrites and grotesquely boastful patriots in which both public and private life is poisoned by the influence of a thoroughly corrupt and mendacious press.
‘Mr Jefferson Brick proposes an appropriate sentiment’ by Hablot Knight Brown for 'The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit.' Dickens took artistic revenge on the transatlantic press through his satire of its journalists. This illustration shows the young protagonist Martin (looking much as one would expect Dickens did during his time in the states) in the New York offices of 'The Rowdy Journal' with its editor Colonel Diver and its war journalist Jefferson Brick (left).
For the next eight years Dickens published no more fiction involving American scenes or characters but in 1850 began editing a weekly journal, Household Word, in which there appeared a number of articles about, or relating, to America, the horror of slavery being a recurrent theme.
‘North American Slavery’ was published in 'Household Words', 18 September 1852. It was a composite article, written by Dickens and another contributor. Dickens wrote the opening part where he greatly praises Mrs Stowe’s book 'Uncle Tom’s Cabin.' Image from the Dickens Journal Online
Its successor journal All The Year Round likewise contained many articles relating to America. Among those written by Dickens himself was ‘A Young Man From the Country’ (1862) in which he justifies his harsh criticisms of public life in America in American Notes by pointing to the outbreak of the Civil War as a direct result of the failure of the political institutions of young Republic. Another entitled ‘Bound for the Great Salt Lake’, published in his ‘Uncommercial Traveller’ series, deals (favourably) with Mormon emigrants to the United States.
‘Bound for the Great Salt Lake’ was published in 'All The Year Round' in 1863 as part of Dickens’s ‘Uncommerical Traveller’ series. Image from the Dickens Journal Online
]]>On display in the exhibition is a very rare book from our collection: it is a first impression, first edition of Great Expectations that was one of only 1000 printed. It sits alongside Weir’s version of the novel which is underlined throughout, battered, covered in ink and paint and with the spine coming away from the wrapper. I love the contrast of these two publications: the pristine first edition and the artist’s copy which is the embodiment of a reader’s personal, and loved Great Expectations.
Louise Weir’s copy of 'Great Expectations'.
Charles Dickens Museum, London.
It was the idea of Weir as a reader of Dickens that first appealed to me when she approached us in 2016 with her project. Her work demonstrates that cultural context, personal circumstances, memories, even the moment in which we choose to pick up the novel (to read it for the first time, or even read it again) impacts our reading experience.
This idea is beautifully illustrated in the artwork Magwitch/Uncle Fred. The work is about the first meeting between Pip and the convict Magwitch who warns the young boy what to expect if he betrays his trust. The story reminded Weir of her Uncle Fred, who when she was a child, would make her cry with frightening stories of ‘Billy Wind’ creeping into the house in the dead of night, squeezing through door cracks and window frames. She paired the piece with a poem constructed from lines from the novel.
'Magwitch/Uncle Fred', Louise Weir, 2012. Mixed media and digital print.
Image courtesy of Louise Weir.
Magwitch /Uncle Fred
A boy may lock his door
May be warm in bed
May draw the clothes over his head
May think himself comfortable and safe
But I will softly creep and creep his way and tear him open
The Open University’s Reading Experience Database is a fascinating resource charting the experiences of readers in the UK from 1450 to 1945. It contains over two hundred recollections of individuals reading Dickens and demonstrates the varying reactions people have had to his writing – from love to loathing. Mary Hammond sums up these Dickens Reader experiences in an essay, Charles Dickens and his readers.
The RED database contains many instances of those who were inspired to some creative output after reading. Weir is an example of this and at the Museum we regularly hear from others who have created artworks or written fan fiction inspired by Dickens’s literature. We were delighted to hear from students at Liverpool John Moores University who recently completed a module called ‘Digital Victorians’. For their project, they took Great Expectations as their inspiration and created a game, 'Monopoly: Great Expectations Edition.
In the Museum’s archive we hold the memoirs of the first illustrator of Great Expectations, artist Marcus Stone. Dickens had taken him for walks in Kent and discussed the locations in the novel.
“I was walking with him … when he made a “study from nature” which I afterwards recognised in the opening scene of “Great Expectations”. Cooling Churchyard, lying in the marsh country down by the river between Gravesend and the Medway. The low church wall, the flat wilderness beyond the church yard intersected with dykes and mounds … The ‘five little stone losenges’ arranged in a neat row; the graves of Pip’s five little brothers were all there.”
Marcus Stone memoir C. I910, J60, Suzannet Collection.
Charles Dickens Museum, London.
Like the first edition on display in the exhibition, Marcus Stone’s manuscript is thrilling because it makes us feel like we are closer to the Great Expectations that Dickens imagined. Weir’s artworks in Expectations of the Past reminds us that the author’s Great Expectations is just the beginning and his original ideas, settings and characters are the launch point for our own imaginings. As the novelist and critic Marcel Proust observed, ‘The end of a book’s wisdom appears to us as merely the start of our own’.
We hope that through this exhibition visitors will recall their first encounter with a Dickens story or perhaps a poignant re-reading. We would love to hear about any creative endeavours inspired by Dickens novels or to know what our visitors feel is their Great Expectations.
Blog by Louisa Price, Curator at the Charles Dickens Museum
]]>Professor Michael Slater MBE examines the significance of the illuminated scroll that Dickens commissioned for the hallway of his home at Gad’s Hill Place in Kent. It is now on display at the Charles Dickens Museum in London (dickensmuseum.com).
This is the first of two short videos in which the celebrated expert explores the relationship between the fact and fiction in Dickens’s life and work. The next video can be found here.
Professor Slater is a Fellow of Birkbeck University of London and Emeritus Professor in its Department of English and Humanities. He is one of the world’s most highly regarded Dickens scholars. He is a past President of the International Dickens Fellowship and of the Dickens Society of America, and former editor of ‘The Dickensian’. His internationally acclaimed books include Charles Dickens. A Life Defined by Writing (Yale UP, 2011), The Great Charles Dickens Scandal (Yale UP, 2012) and Dickens on America & The Americans (Edward Everett Root Publishers, September 2017).
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