News | December 31, 2024

Charles Dickens Museum Celebrates Centenary By Displaying Previously Unseen Items

Charles Dickens Museum

Unseen chalk and pastel sketch of Dickens at the time he lived at Doughty St, believed to be a sketch for the lost third portrait by Samuel Laurence

The Charles Dickens Museum opened its doors for the first time in 1925 and will be celebrating its centenary next year with Dickens in Doughty Street: 100 Years of the Charles Dickens Museum, a celebration of both the life of Dickens and of a museum which now holds the world’s most comprehensive collection of material related to the author.

On the afternoon of June 9, 1925, hundreds of people crammed into no. 48 Doughty Street, and out on to the road outside, for the official opening of the new ‘Dickens House’. The Rt. Hon. The Earl of Birkenhead told the crowd: “I cannot help thinking that he would have cherished the knowledge...that the house which he first rented in London, and to which he brought his young wife, the house in which Oliver Twist and Wackford Squeers and Kate Nickleby were all born, was for all time to be made available to the admirers of his genius.”

Dickens moved into 48 Doughty Street in 1837 with his growing family as a budding author, and by the time the family left he was world famous, on the back of a trio of successful novels written in the house The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby.

On display for the first time will be a chalk and pastel sketch of Charles Dickens at the time when he was living at Doughty Street. Acquired by the Museum in 2019, this is believed to be an original drawing for the ‘lost’ third portrait of Dickens by Samuel Laurence. Also on show will be a draft letter from Charles Dickens to the family servant, Ann Brown, which contains the first paragraphs of the ‘Violated Letter’ in which Dickens forcefully exposed the collapse of his marriage to Catherine.

Charles Dickens Museum

The blubber-stained copy of David Copperfield taken to Antarctica by Captain Scott’s 1910 expedition on the Terra Nova

Charles Dickens Museum

Draft letter from Charles Dickens to the family servant Ann Brown which contains the first paragraphs of the ‘Violated Letter’

Charles Dickens Museum

Sketch for Fagin in the Condemned Cell by George Cruikshank

Other highlights of the exhibition include:

a collection of portraits of Dickens from depictions of the handsome young writer and journalist to the familiar heavily bearded author and performer
some of the earliest pieces of writing by Dickens, an album of poems written as an 18-year-old which were kept by their recipient, Maria Beadnell
the lost portrait, painted while he was writing A Christmas Carol and lost for over 174 years, rediscovered in a box of trinkets in South Africa in 2017, and displayed alongside a letter from Dickens to artist Margaret Gillies arranging his sitting for the painting
the only suit of Dickens’s clothes to survive, as well as his hairbrush, binoculars, quill and ink stand and marriage license
original drawings by Dickens’s favourite illustrators, including Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), John Leech, George Cruikshank and Fred Barnard, and featuring Leech’s preliminary drawings for the first publication of A Christmas Carol and Fagin in the Condemned Cell by Cruikshank
a unique collection of volumes of John Forster’s seminal authorised biography of Dickens, including letters, drawings and other historic items which belonged to the great Victorian actor-manager Sir Henry Irving (undisplayed since 1934)
the copy of David Copperfield taken to Antarctica by Captain Scott’s 1910 expedition on the Terra Nova - stranded in an ice cave, the crew read a chapter every night for 60 nights, and the book is blackened with their fingerprints, likely to have been due to the seal blubber fire that heated the cave

“Dickens in Doughty Street will celebrate the museum’s extraordinary and unrivalled collection of material connected to Dickens’s life, work and legacy," said Cindy Sughrue, outgoing Director of the Charles Dickens Museum. "Gathered together over the past century and displayed in Dickens’s only surviving house in London, a beacon at the centre of the urban landscape quintessentially associated with the writer, the Museum in Doughty Street will be filled with objects that define Dickens’s life and the Museum’s history."

Dickens in Doughty Street: 100 Years of the Charles Dickens Museum runs February 5, 2025 - June 29, 2025.