At home with Charles Dickens

The Charles Dickens Museum at 48 Doughty Street has had a makeover. By my calculations, Dickens lived in 21 separate residences between 1812, when he was born, and 1837, when he rented the Doughty Street house. He was there for only two years before moving to 1 Devonshire Terrace. But even during those two years, he lodged temporarily in eight other places. In his work Dickens venerated the idea of home – precisely because a settled existence in a place he could call his own eluded him for most of his life. In 1856 he finally purchased a house – Gad’s Hill Place in Rochester – yet he continued to travel relentlessly until his death in 1870. He was too driven to stay in one place.

The Doughty Street house opened as a museum in 1925 and is this year celebrating its centenary. It seems miraculous that it should contain articles of furniture that the author possessed and that the most personal of these – a bed – shows signs of actually having been used. Read Dickens’s biography or his own letters and you cannot imagine him ever asleep. We are used to the idea of museums being housed in the actual homes of the famous and we are also used to them feeling not quite right – either too much like a home, which makes us uncomfortable (we weren’t invited), or too much like a museum, which dispels the ambience of a home and the spirit of whoever it was who lived there.

The dining room at 48 Doughty Street. Photo: NewAngle; © Charles Dickens Museum, London

The curatorial team at the Dickens Museum have avoided these pitfalls by varying their approach on a room-by-room basis: emphasising meals and their planning and preparation in one room; beds, with all their uses from birth to death, in another; and work – in its various aspects of composition, serialisation and public performance – in several others. Dickens published three books during his Doughty Street years – The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby – so at least parts of these three novels must have been written in this house.

One room brings together writing materials, desks and a grandfather clock that belonged originally to a certain Moses Pickwick. There’s also a very large desk dating from a late phase in Dickens’s career when he was working on A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. How much time must he have spent staring at this writing surface and seeing right through it into his own invented worlds? When the ideas started to flow, his writing hand could hardly keep pace with them – the original manuscript of Oliver Twist, displayed here, is full of blotches of ink, heavily crossed-out words and the just about legible scrawl of a pen always scurrying across the paper.

An inkstand owned by Dickens. Photo: © Charles Dickens Museum, London

The museum focuses on reading as much as writing. From the early 1850s, Dickens became the first famous writer to give regular public readings of his work to a paying audience. The financial advantages of this were immediately obvious, but the physical strain involved ultimately ruined his health. He would use his entire body to represent physically much of the action described in any given text. The museum display includes publicity materials for these sell-out events, but also medical records showing how they affected his constitution. By 1870, the year in which he died, his doctor was checking his pulse before he gave a reading, immediately after he had finished, and then again 20 minutes later. His recorded pulse rate was at its highest after a reading of the murder scene in Oliver Twist.

Advertising cover of the first issue of Household Words (1850), the weekly magazine edited by Dickens in the 1850s. Charles Dickens Museum, London

The constant travelling, for readings both in the UK and the United States, also hastened his physical decline and strained his relationship with his wife, Catherine. He was often accompanied by a female companion. There is an extraordinary letter in the ground floor corridor of the house setting out the breakdown of his marriage to Catherine that was actually sent to the family servant, Ann Brown. Whatever the dynamics of that household were, they were certainly not conventional. The title of the magazine that Dickens edited throughout the 1850s was Household Words, which suggests a desire to keep his house in order, yet it seems that a sustained idealisation of life in the home remained exactly that: an ideal. He yearned for the harmony and security he projected on to it. The lodgings he grew up in as a child were all of a temporary nature and, in 1824, when he was 12 years old, his father was imprisoned in the debtors’ prison, the Marshalsea, along with his family – all except for Charles who was sent to work at Warren’s Blacking Factory, where he endured the humiliating experience of working in the window of the shop, exposed to the gaze of every passerby. Even as an adult, and despite his status as a celebrity, he was traumatised by ‘houselessness’, as he described it. Perhaps the most vividly haunting among his accounts of the ‘night walks’ he would take on the streets of London was an encounter with a young man sleeping on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields. The youth was clad only in a sheet. When Dickens reached towards him, the poor vagrant panicked and disappeared naked into the night, leaving the sheet in Dickens’s hands.

But there was also another kind of ‘home’ that Dickens could be said to have curated, apart from his own, and this features significantly in the correspondence exhibited in Doughty Street. Urania Cottage was the name given to the institution he founded as a refuge for ‘fallen women’ whose lives he tried to reclaim and reform. The terms of the reformation were Dickens’s own, of course, and were strict. The inmates should have no contact with men and any sign of a relapse would lead to expulsion. Successful reclamation meant starting a new life elsewhere, typically in Australia, where there were lonely male settlers willing to marry women who had ‘graduated’ from the cottage. In this sense he was a homemaker, but only when the women concerned accepted the roles he had devised for them. He was turning them into characters in a storyline of his own invention. The house on Doughty Street was only one of Dickens’s many residences, and what the museum makes clear is that the sheer number of these is entirely in keeping with his lifelong dread of emotional and material insecurity. Was he a great novelist? Yes. But was he a great human being? Pass.

Charles Dickens (1859), William Powell Frith. Photo: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

‘Dickens in Doughty Street: 100 Years of the Charles Dickens Museum’ is at the Charles Dickens Museum, London, until 29 June.