What the Dickens! Celebrate 100 years of the Charles Dickens Museum alongside the great novelist's family

To mark the 100th anniversary of the opening of the Charles Dickens Museum in London, on June 9, a number of the author’s descendants will give talks and readings.

Museum entry will be free to the public in honour of the occasion, with the day also marking the 155th anniversary of Dickens’s death and the opening of a new special exhibition featuring recently acquired, previously unseen items.

Gerald Dickens will explain how his great-great-grandfather survived the Staplehurst train crash 160 years ago, which inspired him to write ghost story The Signalman; great-great-great-granddaughter Lucinda Dickens Hawkesley will discuss Dickens’s international travels. Two great-great grandsons, Mark Dickens and Ian Dickens, will read from A Christmas Carol and David Copperfield respectively, and great-great-great-grandson Ollie Dickens will read from Oliver Twist in the room in which the book was written. 

‘The descendants of Charles Dickens have always been closely involved in the Museum, a truly wonderful refurbishment of the first proper home he lived in as the early success of his writing took off,’ explains Mark Dickens.

Back in 1925, on the afternoon of June 9, 55 years to the day after the writer’s death, hundreds of people thronged in and around 48, Doughty Street — his only surviving home — for the museum’s opening. ‘I cannot help thinking that he would have cherished the knowledge... that the house which he first rented in London, and to which he brought his young wife, the house in which Oliver Twist and Wackford Squeers and Kate Nickleby were all born, was for all time to be made available to the admirers of his genius,’ said the Rt Hon The Earl of Birkenhead, as he addressed the crowd. 

Dickens in Doughty Street: 100 Years of the Charles Dickens Museum runs to June 29; highlights include Dickens’s love poetry, written when smitten with a certain Maria Beadnell, aged 18, and a copy of David Copperfield taken to Antarctica by Capt Scott’s 1910 expedition.

While stranded in an ice cave, the crew read a chapter aloud every night for 60 nights, leaving stains of seal blubber used to light their fires on the pages. In a completely unrelated, but worth relating, anecdote, before it became a museum, 48, Doughty Street was home to Sufragette ‘Slasher Mary’ Richardson in March 1914, which means she must have set forth from there the day she attacked Velasquez’s Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery.