What the Dickens?

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Rosalind Ormiston visits two celebratory exhibitions

7 February 2012 is the bi-centenary of the birth of the author Charles Dickens (1812–70). In an international celebration titled ‘Dickens 2012’, museums, galleries and libraries, writers, filmmakers and the media worldwide will honour the life of a man of extraordinary ability.

To kick-start the 2012 celebrations in London, the British Library and the Museum of London have opened exhibitions that explore Dickens from particular perspectives: at the Museum of London ‘Dickens and London’ (until June 2012), is the first major UK exhibition on the author for 40 years. It focuses on London as Dickens had experienced the city from boy to man. At the British Library, ‘A Hankering After Ghosts: Charles Dickens and the Supernatural’ (until March 2012), explores Dickens interest in the supernatural, through personal correspondence, published texts, books and photographs, to reveals his fascination with ghosts and the hereafter. Each exhibition approaches Dickens from a different viewpoint, thus adding to our knowledge of him rather than duplicating it.

Over at the Museum of London in ‘Dickens and London: One Man and his City’ the exhibition curator Alex Werner, Head of History Collections at the museum, lays 19th-century London before us. The city was integral to Charles Dickens novel settings, plots, and characters. In this exhibition we experience – through contextually rich paintings, etchings and drawings, photographs and film, furniture, objects, costumes, theatre playbills, and Dickens texts – the city of London that Dickens knew. The vast majority of this material is from the museum’s own collections.

Interwoven with the history of the city is a trail of Dickens’ life from his early years when, as a result of his father’s bankruptcy, he left school at the age of 12 to work in a blacking factory situated on Hungerford Stairs. It was a period in his life that affected him adversely and that he re-lived through many different characters in his books and stories. For Alex Warner a major highlight of this exhibition is the inclusion of Dickens’ original Great Expectationsmanuscript (on loan from the Wisbech and Fenland Museum).

At the exhibition entrance we ‘meet’ several of Dickens’ family, colleagues and friends. Their ‘carte de visite’ style photographs are displayed here and include his friend and biographer John Forster, the artist Sir John Millais and wife Effie; the painter William Powell Frith; Harriet Martineau, a campaigner for social justice; the crime writer William Wilkie Collins, and Mark Lemon, founding editor of Punch magazine. ‘Writ large’ on the wall above them are extracts ‘spoken’ by characters from Dickens’ novels: Mrs Gamp, Quilp, Chadband, and more. The temptation is to link photos to text. Leading from this introduction, the curator has created Dickens’ London in a series of chapters, leading in with ‘Chapter 1: A City of Imagination’. Three floor-to-ceiling film screens relay monochrome photographs of daily life for many Londoners, in its dockyards and factories, its alleyways and backstreets. One quickly gains a sense of that quirk of fate in life that hands prosperity to some and poverty to others. It draws attention to Dickens habit of walking the streets of London at night, all night, owing to insomnia, observing people and places that he would draw on to create his characters.

Many artefacts that Dickens would recognize are here and the ‘chapters’ of the exhibition explore the London areas that he knew intimately. Displays focus on his love of the theatre, his professional and home life – the vast ledgers of his bank account at Coutts & Co. reveal his expenditure – and a re-creation of a family room-setting based on his accommodation in London. After his marriage to Catherine Hogarth on 2 April 1836, the couple lived in chambers at 15 Furnival’s Inn before moving to 48 Doughty Street, WC1 in March/April 1837. This ‘chapter’ includes many of his personal possessions, including the desk and chair he sat at to write some of his most famous texts.

Throughout the exhibition it is the changing face of London that captures attention as the city expands to accommodate the building of railway stations and the rise in population. Works of art, particularly William Powell Frith’s The Railway Station, 1839, John Ritchie’s A Summer’s Day in Hyde Park, 1858, and Breakfasting Out, 1859 by Robert Dowling; Covent Garden Market, 1864 by Phoebus Levin and Hungerford Stairs, 1830 by John Harley, are just a few of the many artworks that capture diverse aspects of living in London in this era.

The closing chapter of ‘Dickens and London’ reflects ‘Childhood and Death’ in the city. Dickens charitable benefaction toward the poorest of London, particularly young children and orphans, is evident in the documents displayed. Luke Fildes’ painting Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward (after 1908), and George Elgar Hicks’ An Infant Orphan Election at the London Tavern, 1865, underline the lottery that decided the fate of London orphans. The exhibition ends with a specially commissioned film, A Household Shadow, by documentary filmmaker William Raben, inspired by Charles Dickens’ Night Walks, published in 1860. It compares London after dark as it is today with Charles Dickens’ descriptions of the city 150 years ago.

At the British Library, Alison Lloyd, curator of ‘A Hankering After Ghosts: Charles Dickens and the Supernatural’, has put together a superb exhibition – free to all – devoted to the exploration of Dickens interest in the supernatural. The wealth of primary source material owned by the Library must have made it an immensely enjoyable curatorial task. It begins with the early life of Dickens, revealed in letters that show as a child his fear of the dark, and fear of ghosts and unearthly beings. He is known to have been a sensitive child, easily disturbed, with a vivid imagination about the unseen, and often haunted by bad dreams. He conquered many of his fears of the supernatural through writing and the exhibition explores how Dickens incorporated supernatural phenomena into his stories and capitalized on readers’ interest in it.

In her choice of Dickens’ contributions to the journals Household Words, All the Year Round and in his novel writing, Alison Lloyd enriches our knowledge of Dickens’ fascination of the supernatural. First editions, handwritten texts and early editions of Dickens writings are supported by photographs, film, and audio recordings of story and novel extracts. In ‘The ChristmasTree’ written for Household Words in 1850, the story goes back to Dickens childhood; first editions of both A Christmas Carol and Tale of the Haunted Man – written before Marley’s Ghost appeared in A Christmas Carol – demonstrate his manipulation of the topic.  Audio recordings include ‘The Signalman’, a short ghost story written for the 1866 Christmas edition of All Year Round.

The exhibition is divided into areas of Dickens’ interest in the supernatural and includes sections on Mesmerism and The Ghost Club. Dickens’ letters reveal his avid interest in ghosts although he had a low opinion of spiritualists, mocking the ‘spirit business’ and questioning the motivation of spirits who would return to Earth to make ‘general idiots of themselves’. To read this original text is alone worth a visit to the exhibition. Nonetheless, Dickens did belong to The Ghost Club, which included another notable member, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Members would meet to discuss supernatural experiences and carry out investigations. Dickens collected and classified ghost stories.

John Forster, Dickens’ close friend and biographer remarked in The Life of Charles Dickens (first published 1872–4), that ‘Among his good things should not be omitted his telling of a ghost story. He had something of a hankering after them……’ Forster’s words cleverly introduce and explain the British Library’s timely look beneath the surface of Dickens supernatural writings.