The Charles Dickens Museum

One of the effects of visiting London twenty years after having relocated from there to Somerset in South West England, is my almost panicked consternation at the sheer volume of traffic, the noise of the building sites, the grime, the rattling racket and fierce June heat of the Underground, and the way that everyone’s in such a tearing hurry. I live in a place now where it’s considered the norm to greet fellow villagers with a polite “good morning” or “good afternoon”, so the culture shock is, well, shocking.

However, London, eh? I bloody love it.

On this occasion, I had made the rather blockheaded decision to take a black cab from Paddington Station to Doughty Street, the site of the Charles Dickens Museum, and indeed, the great writer’s old home. Stupid, because I could have been there in half the time by taking a couple of Tube trains, and super-stupid because a three-mile journey in a London taxi lasted almost 40 minutes and cost me forty quid. However, as people were reportedly frying eggs on the scorching platforms of the Circle Line, maybe it was money well spent.

 The museum has a rich and eclectic collection of Dickens’ artefacts, ranging from portraits of the author and his family to original furnishings and personal effects. The presence of the desk at which he wrote ‘Great Expectations’ and ‘Our Mutual Friend’ rather set me back on my heels, and I found the case containing Dickens’ shaving razors and other day-to-day items to be strangely compelling, although not as much as the samples of his original, handwritten manuscripts.

The Charles Dickens Museum, Doughty St, London

The museum also tells the tale of the visit of another famous author to Dickens’ house at Gad’s Hill Place in Kent in 1857. As Dickens put it in a note he pinned up shortly after the lingering guest had at last departed: “Hans [Christian] Andersen slept in this room for five weeks – which seemed to the family AGES!” The original plan was for Dickens fanboy Andersen to stay with the family for a fortnight at the most, but according to Dickens’ daughter Katey, Andersen was “a bony bore, and stayed on and on.”

Little gems like these, along with playbills, copies of original newspapers, and flyers for Dickens’ live reading appearances —  along with his imposing stand-up reading desk and annotated reading copies — can be found all around the Charles Dickens Museum, which boasts more than 100,000 objects.

I adjourned from there to Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street, to glean further information from the manager (plus a splendid lunch and excellent beer in the pub's rightly renowned Chop House, of course). Dickens is said to have been a regular at the pub, which certainly has more claim to him than some of the farther flung hostelries of the capital that say they once enjoyed his custom. As the barman said, “If he really went to all these pubs on a regular basis, well, his horse must have been constantly knackered.” Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese was rebuilt in 1667. Proper 'Great Fire of London' stuff, which, as far as I'm concerned represents Proper History.

All in all, a successful and educational (in a good way!) trip. I hereby endorse the Charles Dickens Museum and Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, but I do have a caveat: don’t bother taking any books to the museum for the author to sign…(spoiler alert!) Dickens died in 1870.