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| Charles Dickens's journalism explored in display at his home | |
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| Anyone at large in the small hours of the morning in Victorian London might have bumped into the most famous writer of the age: Charles Dickens criss-crossing the city, walking off insomnia and depression, but also scooping up material for his campaigning journalism. En route he would have passed theatres and cathedrals, shops and pubs, Bethlem mental hospital and the Marshalsea, where his father had been imprisoned for debt. | Anyone at large in the small hours of the morning in Victorian London might have bumped into the most famous writer of the age: Charles Dickens criss-crossing the city, walking off insomnia and depression, but also scooping up material for his campaigning journalism. En route he would have passed theatres and cathedrals, shops and pubs, Bethlem mental hospital and the Marshalsea, where his father had been imprisoned for debt. |
| More than 150 years after Dickens raged against the scourge of “houselessness”, anyone walking to the author’s former home to view a new exhibition on his campaigning journalism will probably pass the shadowy figures in doorways he described as struggling to pass their days and survive their terrible nights. | More than 150 years after Dickens raged against the scourge of “houselessness”, anyone walking to the author’s former home to view a new exhibition on his campaigning journalism will probably pass the shadowy figures in doorways he described as struggling to pass their days and survive their terrible nights. |
| Every day Cindy Sughrue, director of the Charles Dickens Museum, walks four miles from her home to work, in the writer’s old home at 48 Doughty Street. She says she usually passes at least 20 homeless people in doorways: “It is soul-destroying to see in one of the wealthiest cities on earth.” | Every day Cindy Sughrue, director of the Charles Dickens Museum, walks four miles from her home to work, in the writer’s old home at 48 Doughty Street. She says she usually passes at least 20 homeless people in doorways: “It is soul-destroying to see in one of the wealthiest cities on earth.” |
| A graph on display tracks the rise of poverty and homelessness in Dickens’s day, and in London in the past 10 years. The exhibition was planned long before the general election was called, but Sughrue is struck by how many of the issues Dickens campaigned on linger, including homelessness, unemployment, mental health, education, prison conditions. She has an alert on her phone that is activated whenever somebody uses the term “Dickensian”. She says it usually bleeps dozens of times a day. | |
| The actor Simon Callow, who has performed Dickens’s works, says: “When I was doing the Christmas show in the West End, I would come out of the theatre and in every doorway there would be people encamped with everything they owned in their lives gathered around them. Nothing in Dickens is out of date.” | |
| In a lecture to journalists in the US, Dickens ascribed his success to “the wholesome training of severe newspaper work when a very ungrateful man”. John Drew, professor of English Literature at the University of Buckingham, who has edited Dickens’s vast journalistic output and is joint curator of the exhibition, concedes it is much less read but prefers it to the novels. | |
| “It is vivid and immediate, wonderfully written, full of wit and satire, but it avoids all his traps in the novels of overelaborate plots and sentimentality,” he says. | “It is vivid and immediate, wonderfully written, full of wit and satire, but it avoids all his traps in the novels of overelaborate plots and sentimentality,” he says. |
| The exhibition includes the stick that accompanied Dickens on his nightly walks and the chair in which he sat for weekly editorial meetings for his tuppenny journals, Household Words and later All the Year Round, which reached a circulation of up to 300,000 in the issues with his Christmas stories. They earned Dickens up to the present-day equivalent of £200,000 a year. | The exhibition includes the stick that accompanied Dickens on his nightly walks and the chair in which he sat for weekly editorial meetings for his tuppenny journals, Household Words and later All the Year Round, which reached a circulation of up to 300,000 in the issues with his Christmas stories. They earned Dickens up to the present-day equivalent of £200,000 a year. |
| “He wanted to give his journal the title The Shadow, on the slightly sinister grounds that a shadow can go anywhere into any home or institution, by candlelight, moonlight or starlight. He was talked into the less threatening Household Words, but he was that shadow,” Drew says. | |
| The exhibition covers many of the issues Dickens campaigned on and then mined for his novels, including educational reform, based on his visits to boarding schools in Yorkshire, which became the nightmare schools in his books such as Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickleby. Among the people he met was a man who was still a schoolmaster 15 years after being prosecuted because two boys in his care were blinded by their atrocious conditions. | The exhibition covers many of the issues Dickens campaigned on and then mined for his novels, including educational reform, based on his visits to boarding schools in Yorkshire, which became the nightmare schools in his books such as Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickleby. Among the people he met was a man who was still a schoolmaster 15 years after being prosecuted because two boys in his care were blinded by their atrocious conditions. |
| One of the most vivid exhibits is a tiny newspaper advertisement for the real Bowes academy, where parents could dispose of their children for just 20 guineas a year, covering everything except, significantly, medical bills. It includes the chilling line: “No vacations except by parents’ desire.” | |
| “That does send a shiver down the spine – Dickens was not exaggerating,” Sughrue says. | “That does send a shiver down the spine – Dickens was not exaggerating,” Sughrue says. |
| Restless Shadow is at the Charles Dickens Museum in central London until 29 October. | Restless Shadow is at the Charles Dickens Museum in central London until 29 October. |