This post has been contributed by Dr. Katherine Kim, assistant professor at Molloy University in New York. Katherine’s other recent projects have been book chapters and articles on Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, and Joseph Sheridan LeFanu’s “Schalken the Painter,” and “Bluebeard.” Her article on Charles Dickens and Catherine Crowe appeared in a recent issue of Dickens Quarterly.

The Charles Dickens Museum at 48-49 Doughty Street, London. Unless otherwise stated, all photographs were taken by the author in 2022.

During the 2022 Dickens Society Symposium, a reception was held at the Charles Dickens Museum at 48-49 Doughty Street, London. Mingling mostly occurred in the Pickwick Café and adjoining courtyard, away from the main museum which contains a trove of Dickens-related items.

Dickens moved into the Georgian townhouse, constructed in 1809, with his wife Catherine and their first child in April 1837. From then, until the growing family’s 1851 move to Tavistock House, Dickens’s popularity continued rising through his completion of The Pickwick Papers (1836-37) and publishing of Oliver Twist (1837-39), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39), and Barnaby Rudge (1841) (Malcolmson 2). After Dickens, the house moved through several different hands and acted as a boarding house until B. W. Matz proposed its purchase by the Dickens Fellowship in July 1922 (Malcolmson 7-8, Charles Dickens Museum). The Fellowship purchased the residence in 1923 and opened it as a museum in 1925 (Charles Dickens Museum). 

Portraits of young Charles and Catherine Dickens hang in the morning room. These were created by Samuel Laurence while the couple lived at Doughty Street.

The museum’s website states that the home:

. . . is set up as though Dickens himself had just left.  It appears as a fairly typical middle-class Victorian home, complete with furnishings, portraits and decorations which are known to have belonged to Dickens. A visit to the museum allows you to step back into 1837 and to see a world which is at once both intimately familiar, yet astonishingly different. A world in which one of the greatest writers in the English language, found his inspiration. (Charles Dickens Museum).   

It even includes silhouettes of a young Dickens on the walls guiding visitors through the five-floor residence.

Museum visitors can first spot Dickens’s silhouette at the base of the stairs near the front door.

Despite providing a welcoming reception, the museum, like many others, has experienced difficulties. The purpose and value of preserving historic homes are often questioned during times of economic uncertainty, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic (Lopez 10), and even long-established museums were not immune to the pandemic’s ramifications. As an independent charity, the Charles Dickens Museum lacks regular government funding, and relies on lottery and arts council funding. Consequently, once pandemic closures depleted the museum’s much needed income from admission charges and shop sales, the hard decision was made to furlough staff, with only one person entering each week for preservation maintenance (Treleaven 6). 

The dressing room contains a full suit worn by Dickens, yet the empty standing suit underscores how the house is now a museum rather than a current residence.

Thankfully, the museum recovered. What allowed for its perseverance for nearly a century and through the pandemic? Part of the answer regarding its pandemic recovery is due to efforts to bring the museum to people when people could not visit. Expanding its existing digital presence, the museum held online events and increased its digital collections (Treleaven 6). Still, it can be argued that much of its success developed even before the pandemic not only through effective marketing and Dickens’s enduring popularity, but also, importantly, through the care taken in the museum’s curation.  

The museum’s website contains interactive tours, images and information about their items, archived exhibits, and more ways that visitors can access the museum’s holdings.

In “Dwelling in Possibility: Revisiting Narrative in the Historic House Museum,” Hilary Iris Lowe considers how historic house museums develop narratives that help tackle seemingly interminable funding challenges, noting how some public historians “[emphasize] that storytelling is essential to historical interpretation, by arguing that its emotional content and ability to make connections with audiences is vital” (43). Lowe asserts that literary house museums maintain a “capacity for reflexivity and narrative agility” by, among other things, “making the most of fiction toward embracing multiple points of view about the past” (44). Working with literature, history, and culture experts while considering shifting societal interests and sentiments, the Charles Dickens Museum employs flexibility and embraces multiple perspectives through permanent and temporary exhibitions, projects such as examinations into possible LGBT+ Dickens characters, including Major Bagstock in Dombey and Son and Miss Wade in Little Dorrit, and themed tours such as one given through a housemaid’s perspective (Charles Dickens Museum).

The kitchen and preparation rooms provide insight into the Dickens family’s lives, Victorian kitchen servant practices, and Dickens’s depiction of his The Pickwick Papers character Sam Weller eating in a servants’ quarters.

The museum cannot replicate the Dickens family’s true home since the residence had multiple owners and alterations before the Dickens Fellowship purchase (Treleaven 3). Former assistant curator Emma Treleaven notes that Dickens was “fashionable, and conscious of his status,” and so he frequently made changes to his homes (4). Consequently, the museum combines “an educated, researched guess and a microcosm of Dickens’s whole life” (Treleaven 3). Curator Emily Dunbar explains that it “is consciously curated” to provide “a broad understanding of Dickens, his life and work.  . . . It is filled with items relating to Dickens, his family and his legacy.” While some items pay tribute to writings and characters, others provide insight into Dickens’s family members during and after their time there. For instance, Catherine’s mantel pelmet and published cookbook What Shall We Have for Dinner? (1851) exemplify her skillful needlework and housekeeping, while the snake ring she bequeathed to her sister Georgina, reflects the Victorian idea of snakes in jewelry symbolizing eternal love (Charles Dickens Museum). Such items remind visitors that beyond being a public figure, Dickens was ensconced in family and social units that included individuals with their own opinions, abilities, and backstories.

Catherine Dickens’s mantel pelmet and cookbook What Shall We Have for Dinner?

Dickens’s Gad’s Hill desk and chair.

Some of the most impressive pieces include the desk and chair which Dickens used at Gad’s Hill, years after leaving Doughty Street. Their inclusion in the study, despite historical inaccuracy, highlights the connection between the author’s domestic space and his creative output.   

The Marshalsea Prison grill stands in the middle of the nursery.

Even more incongruent is the Marshalsea Prison grill standing in the center of the nursery. Dickens’s father was jailed in the Marshalsea Prison for debt in 1824 and so twelve-year-old Dickens became a child laborer (Charles Dickens Museum). This experience traumatized Dickens but also provided inspiration for David Copperfield (1849-50) and Little Dorrit (1855-57). By strategically placing the grill so jarringly in the nursery, the museum allows visitors to consider how Dickens used lingering trauma in his art, and could never escape it despite his successes, and even possibly conveying this deep-seated trauma to his children who occupied the nursery. 

Curating historical house museums is tricky; such museums must provide information in a way that brings people in while maintaining a sense of the place’s original purposes. Lisa Junkin Lopez describes the “Sisyphean challenge in making historic house museums feel inviting. Once they are devoid of the people who animated them . . ., domestic spaces tend to become mausoleums . . . petrified and lifeless in their presentation” (10). Adding a pandemic that necessitates social distancing and near-global economic strife further enhances the pressures of keeping a house museum open and interesting to more than just ardent fans of its past owner. The Charles Dickens Museum was able to emerge successfully from the height of the COVID-19 pandemic because of its multifaceted approach to reaching audiences (through in-person visits, special tours and temporary exhibits providing information from various perspectives, virtual interactive accessibility, etc.) and its ability to balance conveying information about Dickens, his family, the rest of the household, and Victorian life with narrative flexibility and openness. Visitors are given opportunities to learn and become invested in multiple (hi)stories without forcing adherence to one particular narrative. Thus, places like the Charles Dickens Museum provide new experiences and idea associations with each visit. 

Though not a true resident of the Dickens household, Bill Spikes represents an amazing example of Victorian kitchen pest control that many (including me) might never have known about without visiting the Charles Dickens Museum.

Works Cited:

Charles Dickens Museum.  Dickens House and Dickens House Fund, dickensmuseum.com. Accessed 18 Nov. 2022.

Dunbar, Emily.  “Re: Dickens Society Symposium Post.”  Received by Katherine J. Kim.  18  July and 5 Aug. 2022. 

Lopez, Lisa Junkin.  “Introduction, ‘Open House: Reimagining the Historic House Museum.’”  The Public Historian, vol. 37, no. 2, May 2015, 10-13. 

Lowe, Hilary Iris.  “Dwelling in Possibility: Revisiting Narrative in the Historic House  Museum.”  The Public Historian, vol. 37, no. 2, May 2015, 42-60. 

Malcolmson, Catherine.  “‘A veritable Dickens shrine’: Commemorating Charles Dickens at the  Dickens House Museum.”  Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, no. 14, 2011,  1-21.  Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.604. 

Treleaven, Emma.  “Curating Historic Interiors at the Charles Dickens Museum during  Covid.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, no. 32, 2021, 1-7.  Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.4734.