09.06.2025
Last night, my friend invited me to come down to the Dickens House as it was free entry. I had been before a few times a few years ago when I used to volunteer at the Foundling Hospital Museum down the road. Charles Dickens is one of my favourite authors as I admire his maximalist style, his sentimentality and also the fact that he came from an impoverished background and was a champion of the oppressed (except for the colonised and the Indians). As I am a published expert on Charles Dickens (‘The Preservation of the Power Name ‘Boz’ and the Foundling’ in The Dickens Quarterly), I decided to go down and give him a tour around the place. It was almost like being invited into the author’s home by the author himself. A visit to the ghost.
On arrival, I was given solicitous care by the staff because they saw I was carrying a walking stick. And almost at once, I met a volunteer I work with because I am also in the museums industry. As ever, he showcased his great customer service skills.
We started off in the kitchen downstairs and I was very pleased to see how inviting and friendly the volunteers were. We spoke to two of them, one an intern who was a student in Museum studies. The volunteer in the kitchen was very knowledgeable and we talked about Dickens’s love of food and wine which stemmed from his starvation as a child. We speculated on whether he would have spent any time in the kitchen. There was a likelihood as he was quite fastidious in matters as a whole and food was one of his especial subjects. In the corner of the room there was an interesting curator label – after Dickens, one of the residents in the house had been a sufragette who had slashed the Velazquez Venus in the National Gallery.
In the laundry room, I commented to another visitor, a blonde American lady, that this was the height of sophistication and luxury in that period. They even boiled the Christmas pudding there once a year!
On the ground floor, in the dining room, we admired the Moses Pickwick clock that had been gifted to Charles Dickens. I had written about Charles Dickens’s assumption of the name Moses in my article, so I knew quite a lot about this gentleman who had been a foundling. We speculated on who had carved the letters C.D. onto one of the utensils in the room.
The second room on the ground floor was the morning room. We spent quite a while gazing at the portrait of Catherine, Dickens’s wife. This captivating piece was painted by Daniel Maclise. The setting is the morning room itself. In response to what one of the visitors said, and sadly to disillusion her, I mentioned that Dickens eventually separated from her and even tried to get her admitted to a lunatic asylum. There was the President of one of the Dickens Committee there and I told her about my article about Dickens.
Upstairs, there was Dickens’s study and the drawing room. I was excited to see the desk where all the magic happened. It was always the highlight of my trip there in the past. A volunteer called Michael answered my friend’s questions and told us about the lighting at the time for writing. Then he answered my questions about who owned the house at the moment and showed me to the drawing room because I said to him that I had heard that the descendant of Dickens was there too.
The drawing room was magnificent. It must have been such a wonderful experience to meet the author there. The descendant was a handsome, brown-haired, articulate and charismatic young gentleman called Ollie. I watched an eager crowd filming him as they asked him questions. I waited until they had gone and asked him if he wrote himself. Not so much he said, although he was an actor. I said that then he was following in Dickens’s footsteps and we talked about the author’s dramatic experiences.
In the exhibitions space, we admired the only surviving costume that we knew Dickens had worn and talked about his heroism when there was a train wreck. It was also a great highlight to see the Gold beater’s arm (‘the Golden Arm’) of a Tale of Two Cities. While for Dickens, it stood for the brutality of the Revolution, for me the anarchist, it stood as a symbol of hope for the transformation of the present and the future.
On the second floor, it was interesting to learn that Dickens had surrounded himself with mirrors so that he could practice his acting. I imagined him there, gesticulating in front of his mirrors, refining the expressions on his face, communicating something to his imaginary audience.
In the dressing room, we looked out of the window that Dickens might have looked out of. An emotional moment was in Mary Hogarth’s bedroom. I imagined her dying in Dickens’s arms and I said to my friend that I found the sentimentality in the work of Dickens very affecting. I had found the death of Little Nell (modelled on Mary Hogarth, his young sister-in-law) to be quite affecting. It is the emotion that Dickens arouses that is the draw to his work in a modern Western literature of restraint, of stunted emotion and stunted prose.
The whole room was dedicated to death and the vacuum it brings with it. The death of Mary Hogarth and Little Nell was likened to the death of Dickens himself in an exhibit, ’The Empty Chair’, Gad’s Hill–Ninth of June 1870, a print of an engraving by Samuel Luke Fildes. Apparently, this haunting image of the author’s absence influenced Van Gogh who also famously painted an empty chair too, to play with the idea of absence and presence. I am an admirer of both Dickens and Gogh, so this creative correspondence was highly engaging.
After I had looked at the empty chair, I myself fell into the empty chair in the room. I have had that leg operation and I needed a rest for the niggling pain in my shin but I was very pleased that it wasn’t that bad over the past few days and I am improving on the strength in the leg. The volunteer very kindly cleared it and gave it to me. An elderly lady passing by me looked at me conspiratorially and fanned herself, evidently in the throes of a hot flush.
My friend and I read a children’s book together in the book corner to do with a Jewish woman called Eliza who had written to complain to Dickens about his representation of the Jewish Fagin. The children’s book was intended to show it as an example of social transformation and atonement for wrong to a people. I did wonder to myself what Dickens would have made of me writing to him as an Indian to address the wrongs that he had done to our people in his writing (“The Perils of Certain English Prisoners” for instance showed his lack of sympathy for the Indian Mutiny). What was interesting about the book is that we think these kind of debates about identity are a mark of ‘woke culture’, when we have been having these debates for centuries. And still racism persists. Because people will not wake up from oppression, prejudice and injustice.
In the upper floor, we talked about the influence of the raven in Barnaby Rudge upon Edgar Allen Poe. And whether ravens could actually talk!
On the way out, Ollie and the other staff gave us a warm farewell. It was a nice ending to a beautiful visit. I remarked to my friend that I was inspired again to read the novels of this master. Looking around at the lived reality and material objects and scenes that had given form to the works had really enriched my understanding of the memories of reading and being in the mind of Dickens. The experience was invigorating, incredible, intimate.
diary of a lone man 