Dickens House Museum

Website: http://www.dickensmuseum.com

Today I visited the Dickens House Museum near Russell Square. I'd seen the signpost in Russell Square pointing to the mysterious Dickens House Museum for years before but only managed to visit it today.

The museum is at 48 Doughty Street, a house where famed author Charles Dickens lived. His career was just taking off when he lived here and it was here that he wrote Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nichleby before moving house to a bigger place after he'd become rich.

To enter the museum you have to ring a doorbell and be buzzed in. I entered, walked through to the rear of the house and bought my £4 student ticket in the shop. I was told that the exhibition was in no particular order and I should just wander around.

First stop was the dining room at the front of the ground floor: This is apparently where Charles Dickens hosted hundreds of fun dinner parties with famous actors and writers of the day. There were lots of pieces of furniture he owned on display (including, for example, two monogrammed knife holders). I've only read two Dickens stories so I wasn't sure if I was under-prepared for a museum about him. As it turned out, the museum focussed fairly squarely on his life and not so much on his works.

The next room had a lot of portraits and photographs of Dickens and his family. He had 9 children and an affair - quite an eventful family life... There was an interesting sequence of about 20 photos showing Dickens from young to old. There was also an interesting stereographic image of him which I tried to view (unsuccessfully) in 3D:After this room I went to the first floor for a quick look around. Here I learnt that Dickens wrote so quickly that he didn't have time to plan the plots in detail - he just figured it out as he went. I also learnt that his books were first published in monthly instalments:These monthly instalments are prized by collectors and it sounded like the stories were written month-by-month, sometimes having reader's comments incorporated into the plots. Some "desk furniture" that he used was on display and included a china monkey which was one of Dickens's favourite pieces:I had a quick glance at the front study before rushing down to the basement to catch the start of a half hour long film about the life of Charles Dickens. I learnt that when he was about 10 years old his family fell into bad debt and were put in a debtor's prison. He got a job in a factory labelling boot dye and went to visit them in prison. It sounded pretty grim but, or so the film suggested, it was these bad experiences that enabled him to write such great stories.

He was first published under the pseudonym Boz before writing for a newspaper and then publishing the Pickwick Papers. These became a great success and he became famous. He kept up a high output of work and, by the time he died, was hailed as a national hero.

After the film I looked at the top floor but I was getting a little bit tired of the museum. All the information was written in little snippets around the walls - it was quite an effort to put the whole story together. Important pieces of information were just as prominent as dull/unimportant pieces (e.g. "This clock belonged to a friend of Charles Dickens" vs "Dickens campaigned for...").

One highlight I suppose was seeing his Reading Table. This was carefully preserved in a dimly lit room and was designed by Dickens himself. He used it in public readings of his work which he was paid enormous amounts of money for.I took a brief look outside at the nice garden before leaving.Summary: Interesting bits of history about the life and times of Charles Dickens. Could do with some more general introductory material. Makes you realise that people who achieve great success almost always work really really hard to do so.