This post is contributed by Anya Eastman, a third-year, Technē funded PhD student at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her thesis explores the posthumous representation of Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Oscar Wilde, with a focus on the relationship between texts and heritage sites. Anya is the Social Media Manager for the Dickens Project (University of California, Santa Cruz) and an education and curatorial freelancer at the Charles Dickens Museum (London). Anya is also a Curatorial Assistant in Royal Holloway’s Culture Team, where she works with art collections in the Picture Gallery. She can be found on Twitter @AnyaFlorence_ or via email at anya.eastman@rhul.ac.uk.

In 2022 I undertook a placement as Research Assistant for the special exhibition: To Be Read at Dusk, Dickens, Ghosts and the Supernatural. As part of this placement, I was tasked with sifting through the online catalogue, trying to find items that we might want to put on display. I was trialing keyword searches for all the synonyms of “ghost” that I could think of: “spectre,” “phantom,” “spirit,” “apparition” — with some help from the CLiC Dickens resource, which helped me to identify language that Dickens used in his writing — in order to try and find “things” that we could start to build the exhibition narrative around (Eastman “To Be Read at Dusk”). I came across a version of A Christmas Carol, with the catalogue stating “very tiny.” It became imperative that I find this book and see just how tiny “very tiny” is. 

I located the box containing the book and opened it to find several other tiny copies of Dickens’s texts, mostly short stories (Bleak House could never), and one “very tiny” copy of A Christmas Carol. I posted the finding on my Twitter account with the caption: “Today’s @DickensMuseum find: catalogue entry read “very tiny” and we were too intrigued not to dig it out. This may have been owned by Tiny Tim himself @Dickens Society.”

The tweet was engaged with four hundred and sixty-five times, retweeted thirty times, liked one hundred and four times, and bookmarked twice. I had not quite gone viral, but it felt like I was on the precipice of the Nineteenth-Century Studies equivalent!

My PhD focuses on authorial heritage and memorialisation, so I have done a lot of thinking about why certain objects draw people in or evoke a sense of nostalgia. This unanticipated response to the image of the “very tiny” Christmas Carol prompted me to consider why that object, in particular, had interested so many people, and whether the way in which I had displayed it on social media had any part to play in the response. Through exploring the affect of miniature, the effect of “curatorial hands,” and the blurring of real and fictional worlds, I use the tiny Christmas Carol as a way of thinking about how we curate Dickens, and authorial heritage more broadly.

I have personally always loved miniature objects: snow globes, model villages, these incredibly intricate book ends with model worlds inside of them that have been saved on my Etsy page forever, but this tweet made me wonder how many people feel an innate draw to tiny things, and whether the reason for that draw might be an intrinsic nostalgia that is instilled in the miniature.

In On Longing, Susan Stewart states “the miniature book is a celebration of a new technology, yet a nostalgic creation endowed with the significance the manuscript formerly possessed” (39). For Stewart, the miniature book embodies the interface between past and present. The miniature book links to childhood — further evoking nostalgia — and to the souvenir, which echoes this sense that the miniature book allows us to take something away, both from a place but also from a moment in time. There is a heightened temporal significance attached to the miniature book. These types of objects have the unique ability to recapture something that feels lost and longed for, enabling a kind of transtemporal travel. The “very tiny” form of the Christmas Carol novella evokes affect in a way that the normal size text does not. In seeing it, we think of it as an object which feels somehow more representative of a bygone time than a full-sized book. This seems all the more relevant in the case of the curated museum object, which has been received in the past and stored in the manner which best prevents it from ageing, such that we can appreciate it in the present.

To give scale to the size of the book, the images I posted on Twitter include my gloved hand, which has the additional effect of attributing a haptic quality to the books. Johanna M.E. Green, in her work on medieval manuscript materiality, refers to “curatorial hands” to explore the idea that heritage social media posts with “curatorial hands […] capitalise on the audience’s materially disenfranchised desire to touch (something that they are traditionally prohibited from doing).”

Even though my hand is gloved, the images I put on Twitter restore the tiny book to being an object of touch and provide a kind of “hands-on” experience, with a part of the museum collection that is normally hidden from view. Furthermore, if this item were on display in the museum, it would be within a display case and either closed, or open on a specific page, resulting in the dynamic, tactile quality of the object being altered.

My final theory for the popularity of my tweet comes from thinking about the way in which our curation of Dickens so often overlaps with the curation of his fictional worlds and characters. From newspaper clippings at the time of Dickens’s death, to Buss’s Dickens‘s Dream, Dickens’s memorialisation has an inherent slipperiness between fact and fiction. In the Charles Dickens Museum, Dickens’s life is curated alongside the life of his characters, with items “belonging” to his characters and their worlds displayed alongside objects from his own. Clare Pettit has referred to the Doughty Street Museum containing the display of “real” and “imagined” objects (3). My favourite example of this is the two windows displayed alongside each other in the nursery of the museum, one being the window “through which Oliver Twist is said to have been pushed by Bill Sikes on the occasion of the burglary,” and the other being the window from Dickens’s childhood bedroom in Bayham Street, Camden (CDM). These windows are curated with continuity; there is no shift in how they are displayed in order to signal a transition from the factual world into the fictional. In my experience, visitors tend to accept them being displayed alongside each other without question. Dickens is allowed passage into the fictional world and the same quality of transcendence is reciprocated for his characters in the museum space.

So, I wonder if in tweeting that the “very tiny” copy of A Christmas Carol may have been owned by Tiny Tim himself, I unintentionally played into the tendency to overlap curating Dickens with curating his characters, evoking a nostalgic image of Tiny Tim, reading a tiny copy of the text that writes him into creation.

In my remaining time on placement at the Dickens Museum, I tried to tweet “Friday finds,” these included an article discussing “eminent people with remarkable ears” (in which a sketch of Dickens’s ears appears alongside contemporary artists, musicians and travellers), a miniature calendar by Dickens’s niece which was a duplicate of one sent to Buckingham Palace for Queen Elizabeth’s Doll’s house in 1929, and an autograph from Dickens following a public reading of A Christmas Carol in Aberdeen. None of the above elicited the same curious excitement as my blue-gloved hand holding Tiny Tim’s  “very tiny” copy of A Christmas Carol.

That tiny copy of A Christmas Carol did not make it into the exhibition, but another (slightly less fragile) one — with a lovely red and green cover — did, displayed alongside several other copies of Dickens’s ghost stories. It is impossible to say whether the tiny book was as intriguing in person. With so many fascinating objects surrounding it, it definitely had the potential to be overlooked. This is an invaluable reminder of the duality in digitisation; while the object’s material qualities are less transferable, digital display showcases items in isolation, providing an entirely different perspective to viewing an object as part of a collected work. As many institutions place growing emphasis on digital collections in order to increase accessibility, it is worth considering what this shift can bring — especially if consideration comes in the form of meditating over a tiny book.

Works Cited

Buss, Robert W., Dickens’s Dream (1875), H 90.5 x W 111.5 cm, oil on canvas, the Charles Dickens Museum (London).

Eastman Anya (@AnyaFlorence_, 22 April 2022). “Today’s @DickensMuseum find: catalogue entry read “very tiny” and we were too intrigued not to dig it out. This may have been owned by Tiny Tim himself @Dickens Society.” (tweet) <https://twitter.com/AnyaFlorence_/status/1517504465254899712 > [accessed 26 May 2023].

Eastman, A. (2022) “To Be Read at Dusk”: Ghost Hunting in the CLiC Corpora [Blog post]. CLiC Fiction Blog, University of Birmingham. Retrieved from [https://blog.bham.ac.uk/clic-dickens/2022/07/20/dickensghosts/].

Green, Joanna M.E., “Digital Manuscripts as Sites of Touch: Using Social Media for “Hands-On” Engagement with Medieval Manuscript Materiality” Archive Journal, 6 (2018).

Mahlberg, M., Stockwell, P., Wiegand, V. and Lentin, J. (2020) CLiC 2.1. Corpus Linguistics in Context, available at: clic.bham.ac.uk [Accessed: 26 May 2023].

Pettitt, Clare, “On Stuff,” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies of the Long 19^th Century, 6/19 (2008) <https://19.bbk.ac.uk/article/id/1601/>.

Stewart, Susan, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Duke University Press).

“Two Small Windows,” Charles Dickens Museum, permanent collection, London.

The Charles Dickens Museum, online information and exhibition text, accurate as of 26 May 2023.