Museum: Charles Dickens: Powerful and sensitive

He was actually supposed to become a lawyer. He became a novelist: Charles Dickens, born in 1812 in Landport near Portsmouth, died in 1870 at his country estate Gads Hill Place near Rochester. For two years he served as a clerk for a lawyer in London, at the same time he learned autodidactic stenography and, through the intervention of an uncle, worked as a parliamentary reporter for the Morning Chronicle from 1831 to 1835. He achieved his first literary success with the “Sketches by Boz” (1836, German “Londoner Sketches”, 1838).

At the end of March 1837, Dickens and his wife Catherine moved into the Georgian town house at 48 Doughty Street in the London district of Bloomsbury. From here it was not far to the Foundling Hospital, the home for foundlings, orphans and children from impoverished families, for which Dickens was committed. Which was only part of his charitable commitment. There he organized fundraising events and donated to, among others, the Hospital for Sick Children, the Field Lane School and the Literary Friendly Society. Not far from Doughty Street, where members of the middle classes lived, Dickens faced abject poverty. Saffron Hill was a slum. And Dickens himself had experienced abject poverty as a child. This was to shape his literary work and sensitized him to need and misery.

During the two years that the family lived in the house on Doughty Street, Dickens was very productive. Here he completed “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club” in 1837, a predominantly humorous portrayal of English life that was already on everyone’s lips when it was published in 18 booklet-form sequels by Chapman & Hall appeared. The book contributed significantly to his fame.

It was also on Doughty Street that he completed his novel “Oliver Twist” (1838), in which he describes the fate of the foundling of the same name who grows up in a poorhouse. In this novel he clearly positioned himself against the pauperism of the early industrial age.

Dickens also devoted himself to the English school system, for example in his socially critical work “Nicholas Nickleby” (1838/39, German “Life and Adventures of Nicolaus Nickleby”, 1839). In Meyer’s “Pocket Lexicon of English Literature” (VEB Bibliografies Institut, Leipzig 1965) he is honored with the words: “In his novels, Dickens described the life of the lowest classes of the people in a realistically moving way; He hoped that capitalist class contradictions could be overcome through mutual tolerance and appealed to the charity of the ruling classes.

In 1839 the Dickens family moved to Devonshire Terrace, Regent’s Park. From then on, various tenants lived in the house on Doughty Street and it eventually became a kind of hostel. Until 1922, the Dickens Fellowship raised money to purchase the now-for-sale building and convert it into a Dickens memorial. On June 9, 1925, the Dickens House Museum opened.

Anyone who visits the house today gets the impression that the world-famous writer has only just left the house. A freshly bleached nightgown is spread out on a bed, the table in the dining room is set, the kitchen is tidy and in the already decaying wine cellar there are still a few old bottles waiting to be uncorked. At first glance, it is noticeable that Charles Dickens and his wife Catherine, who gave birth to ten children, surrounded themselves with countless portraits of themselves. The portrait of the young couple, painted by Samuel Lawrence (1812–1884), also hung in the houses the couple later lived in until their separation in 1858.

Catherine had also commissioned the Irish artist Daniel Maclise (1806–1870), who was a friend of the Dickens family, to draw her children Charley, Katey, Mamie and Walter so that she could then take the portraits with her on a trip to the US. Catherine attested to a “beautiful resemblance” to the bust of her husband, which was created by the American sculptor Henry Dexter (1806–1876) during Dickens’ first reading tour of the USA in 1842. In the Dining Room, a plaster cast of the lost original is displayed in front of a stained glass window.

The writer acquired the desk that can be seen in his study in 1859. Dickens’ reading table can be seen in the Drawing Room. He designed this for his public performances, in the preparation of which he involved his entire family and friends. When reading his novel scenes, which he underlined with gestures, Dickens always wrote down stage directions in his books in advance – such as “sigh”, “moan” or “knock”. Dickens was as popular as a lecturer as he was as a novelist; the 5,000 advance ticket sales (plus bootlegging) that took place, for example, before an appearance by the man considered a “star of literature” bear witness to this. As a youth, Dickens wanted to become an actor and was always a frequent theater visitor. When he directed a play, “The Frozen Deep” by Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) in 1857, he met the young actress Ellen Ternan (1839-1914), who only gave in to his advances after a long time. At this point, the married couple Catherine and Charles Dickens were already separated. However, a divorce was not possible in the strict England of Queen Victoria, that “flatulent old hag” (James Joyce).

What would a writers’ museum be without writings? The museum mainly presents Dickens’ own works, manuscripts and manuscripts. When he moved into the house on Doughty Street, he did not yet have a library worthy of the name. His colleague, the philosophically inclined Goethe biographer George Henry Lewes (1817–1878), observed during a visit to Dickens’ study in 1838 that there were only “three-volume novels and travel books” there. Among the manuscripts from the museum’s collection of 100,000 objects, what stands out, in addition to the calligraphy on the manuscript pages of “Nicholas Nickleby,” is a short letter that Dickens wrote before he started working for a lawyer. It is the earliest handwritten document that survives from him.

The tributes to this socially critical writer by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx cannot be found in the museum. Engels had Dickens in mind when he wrote in 1844 that the new generation of writers would devote their attention to “the poor and despised class, their fates and their happiness, their joys and their sorrows.” And Marx wrote ten years later: “Dickens is one of the greatest examples of English poets whose detailed and linguistically powerful works have given more political and social truths than all professional politicians, journalists and moralists put together.”

Charles Dickens Museum, 48 Doughty Street, London, https://dickensmuseum.com