Museums & Attractions

Doughty Street in Bloomsbury is one of those very desirable black-bricked terraces – a smooth strip of the kind of five-storey, pathologically symmetrical houses – all fanlights, checked floor tiles and tall sash windows – that change hands for a million or three when they come on the market. Snooping round the Charles Dickens Museum at No 48 is as much an exercise in property envy as anything. In between peering at the the great man’s snuff box and admiring his sideboard, you can ponder the fact that Dickens lived in this massive house when he was just 27 – and he wasn’t even particularly rich and famous at the time. In fact, it was his starter home, the place he took his wife Catherine soon after they had married, and where his first child, Charles, was born in 1837. Though it was a comfortable middle-class enclave – the street had gates at either end to keep the riff-raff out – it clearly wasn’t seen as particularly salubrious, and two years later the Dickens family had upgraded to Devonshire Terrace in Marylebone. While tourists may adore the museum as a quaint piece of old England preserved for posterity, Londoners will recognise it as something closer to their hearts: a monument to house-price inflation.

London has a conflicted relationship with Charles Dickens in general. On the one hand he’s one of our city’s treasures, not just a mouthy yarn-spinner in the best cockney tradition, but a philanthropic chronicler of Victorian street life and campaigner for social justice, and, on the other hand, he’s inescapably part of the shortbread-peddling heritage industry. The pea-souper, apples-and-pears, Mary-Poppins version of Victorian London that bristles with dancing chimney sweeps and rosy-cheeked orphans may not exist in Dickens’ novels, but that hasn’t stopped the tea-towel merchants from lumping him cheerfully in with Eliza Doolittle and Jack the Ripper.

Arguably, ‘A Christmas Carol’ is the book which is to blame for his reputation as a writer of cutesy fables, despite the fact that its themes are, just as in the rest of his work, poverty and social responsibility. But as the letters and memorabilia displayed in the house prove, Dickens was also a bon viveur, very fond of filling his house with friends and lively conversation, and a keen follower of Christmas tradition. A display in the second-floor drawing room shows how it might have been decked out for a Victorian Yuletide, complete with large quantities of evergreens, red ribbons and a tree festooned with the kind of ornaments Dickens described in his writings.

To its credit, the Museum is also clearly committed to correcting any impression that Dickens focused only on the cosy and picturesque. At the top of the house, is a new exhibition detailing his views on the deprivation and squalor he saw all around him, especially during his youth, when his father was thrown into the debtors’ prison at Marshalsea and Charles was reduced to sticking labels on jars of thick polish at Warren’s boot-blacking factory. Tellingly, this section of the house is introduced by a quote from the middle of ‘A Christmas Carol’, when the Ghost of Christmas Present shows a chastened Scrooge two ragged, starving children called Ignorance and Want, and mocks him with his own harsh judgement on beggars.

‘Have they no refuge or resource?’ cried Scrooge. ‘Are there no prisons?’ said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. ‘Are there no workhouses?’ We may find little crutch-wielding Tiny Tim and honest Bob Cratchit hard to take in their sugar-coated Christmas card incarnations, but it’s worth remembering that, even in his comfortable nineteenth-century gated community, Dickens was a political animal at heart.

The Charles Dickens Museum, 48 Doughty St, WC1N (020 7405 2127/www.dickensmuseum.com) Russell Square tube.

Other attractions dedicated to the great man
141 Bayham Street
A plaque marks the site of Dickens’ childhood home in Camden Town.

Dickens’ London and A Dickens Walk in Docklands
Walks of London offer two Dickens walks – one around Lincoln’s Inn and the other offering an East End slant on Dickens, taking in the Prospect of Whitby and Grapes pubs as well as the supposed site of the opium den that featured in ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood’. www.walksoflondon.co.uk

Dickens Memorial
Dickens’ grave in Westminster Abbey is marked by a simple inscription; fans lay a wreath on the anniversary of his death.

Dickens World, Chatham
This theme park offers attractions such as an animatronic show introducing Dickens’ best loved characters (‘Corporate functions also catered for’), The Great Expectations Boat Ride (‘Unsuitable for pregnant ladies’) and a soft play area called Fagin’s Den (‘Socks must be worn’).
Dickens World, Leviathan Way, Chatham Maritime, Kent (01634 890 421/www.dickensworld. co.uk) Chatham rail.

Marshalsea Prison
All that remains of the debtors’ prison is a stretch of wall and an entrance arch in what used to be St George's Churchyard on Borough High Street, but has since been converted into a small park.

The Old Curiosity Shop
The shop at 13 Portsmouth Street, WC2, dates back to the sixteenth century and claims to be the inspiration for the Dickens book, although it only took the name after the novel was published.