Book Review: Charles Dickens 13 - "A Tale of Two Cities"



Photo of Dickens (46 yrs.) by G. H. Watkins (1858)

The origin of A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens’s famous novel set during the French Revolution – goes back ultimately to Thomas Carlyle’s influential book The French Revolution: A History, which was published in 1837, when Dickens was 25 years old. Dickens became obsessed with the book, and he read it hundreds and hundreds of times. He eventually met Carlyle and they became friends – the Scottish author came to see some of Dickens’s amateur theatricals, and he sometimes offered praise and critiques of the younger writer’s novels. When Dickens was writing A Tale of Two Cities through most of 1859, he carried Carlyle’s book around with him all the time – there is a photograph of Dickens that shows him reading it in the garden at Gad’s Hill Place.

Of more immediate influence on A Tale of Two Cities were two plays: The Frozen Deep by Wilkie Collins, and The Dead Heart by Watts Phillips. Dickens had long been fascinated by accounts of the doomed Arctic voyage of the John Franklin expedition. In 1845 Franklin had attempted to find a way through the last un-navigated section of the Northwest Passage. Dickens had written several articles about the expedition for his magazine Household Words. When Wilkie Collins and Dickens were visiting Paris together in early 1856, Dickens persuaded his friend (primarily a novelist) to write a play based on the Franklin expedition that could be presented at the next Dickens family Twelfth Night celebration at Tavistock House. Although Collins wrote the drama, Dickens was constantly giving him advice; and later he heavily revised it and added some scenes of his own. And, as usual, Dickens took charge of virtually every aspect of the production.

Poster for Twelfth Night play at Dickens's home

The Frozen Deep turned out to be a melodrama concerning the rivalry between two members of the expedition for the same woman. Wilkie Collins played the part of the expedition leader, the successful suitor; and Dickens acted the part of Richard Wardour, who had been rejected. Wardour is presented as an ambivalent character who is motivated both by love and anger. But at the conclusion of the play, Wardour sacrifices himself, in order to save the life of his rival. Dickens revised and edited his part – creating a good man whose heart and soul had been frozen by his loss of love. As Peter Ackroyd points out in his biography, the character of Wardour became a “self-revelation” for Dickens. He had always shown great ability as an actor in previous amateur theatricals, but this time his identification with the part was intense. There had often been a rather histrionic tendency in his approach to drama, but eyewitness accounts described an even more extraordinary frenzy in his acting. A review in The Leader noted the “savage energy” in his performance.

In addition to the Twelfth Night production on 6 January, Dickens’s amateur troupe gave three more performances that week - about 90 people were present for each. After the intensity of this week of performances, Dickens and Wilkie Collins took a break from work for a few days down in Brighton. During their stay on the south coast, Dickens’s friend Benjamin Webster – the actor and dramatist who ran the Adelphi Theatre in London – read to him the manuscript of a new play by Watts Phillips called The Dead Heart. It was also a story of self-sacrifice – set this time in Paris during the French Revolution, rather than the frozen Arctic. At the dramatic conclusion of this play, there is a surreptitious substitution at the guillotine.



Scene from The Frozen Deep

Six months later a special benefit performance of The Frozen Deep was mounted, in order to raise money for the family of the recently-deceased Douglas Jerrold. Jerrold – a playwright and journalist – had been a friend of Dickens for twenty years. The benefit took place on 4 July at the Gallery of Illustration in Regent Street. Queen Victoria was in attendance. Dickens had planned to raise an even £2,000 for the Jerrold family, but they fell short of the target. When he was invited by a promoter in Manchester to give several performances at the New Free Trade Hall, Dickens seized the chance to make up the shortfall.

When Dickens went north to check out the facilities in Manchester, he realised that the hall was much too large for some of his amateur actors to cope with. They just didn’t have the training to project their voices into a hall designed to hold 2,000 people. Dickens decided to hire some professional actors who could handle these new demands. And that is how Charles Dickens met the actress Ellen Ternan. He invited the entire Ternan family to participate – Mrs. Ternan and her three acting daughters: Fanny, Maria and Ellen. They were all experienced actors and had been on the stage of many of London’s top theatres.



Ellen Ternan



Ellen Ternan was just eighteen when she performed in The Frozen Deep in Manchester. According to an intimate of the Ternan family, Ellen was “outwardly placid, but firm underneath”. Dickens’s second daughter, Kate, remembered her as “small, fair-haired, and rather pretty”. “She had brains,” Kate thought, but she was actually the least talented of the three acting sisters – pushed into acting because that was what the family did (she first stepped onto the stage when she was three years old), rather than responding to a sense of vocation. Dickens became enthralled by the teenaged actress. He was forty-five years old, married, with nine children. But he seemed drawn inexorably to this attractive young woman. It was a classic mid-life crisis. Like the male protagonist of his recent novel Little Dorrit – Arthur Clennam – Dickens’s attraction to this unattainable woman was probably intensified by his sense that life’s possibilities were slipping away from him, and by his unhappy marriage with Catherine.

Meanwhile, the two performances in Manchester were such a triumph that Dickens agreed to add an extra show. And it was as he lay “dying” on the stage as the self-sacrificing Richard Wardour – near the play’s conclusion on this final night – that Dickens conceived the basic idea for A Tale of Two Cities.

1935 Hollywood version of A Tale of Two Cities - directed by Jack Conway, starring Ronald Colman

Dickens began a long, desperate pursuit of Ellen Ternan – but he had to do it discreetly, in order to protect both her reputation and his public image. He began to express what he was going through to some of his closest confidants. “Poor Catherine and I are not made for each other,” he wrote to John Forster. He turned away demonstrably from his wife in October, 1857. He instructed the maid to divide the main bedroom at Tavistock House into two rooms, by setting up a partition. He was so agitated at this time that one night he got up at 2 a.m. and walked 30 miles through the night from Tavistock House in central London to Gad’s Hill Place in Kent.

At Christmas in 1857, there was no large family party because of the turmoil in the house. But Dickens did do some more public readings. He had given a powerful speech on behalf of the Hospital for Sick Children – it helped to raise £3,000. A few weeks later he did yet another public reading of A Christmas Carol for the same benefit fund, and finally the hospital was effectively endowed for the very first time. The power of these performances led Dickens to consider these public readings as an alternate source of income. He realised that if he undertook an extended tour around the country, he could raise some badly-needed funds to stabilise his own financial situation. There was, in fact, already a tradition of writers giving public presentations – more often lectures, though, than readings. They were undertaken both as educational activities and high forms of entertainment. He did a dry run in Edinburgh to see if the public would support his readings as paid entertainment, rather than charitable activities. It was a resounding success. His first non-benefit, paid public reading was at St. Mary’s Hall in London. It was the beginning of a twelve-year run of public readings that would continue until the end of his life.

Dickens doing a public reading - a wood engraving by Charles Barry (1867)

In the early months of 1858 Dickens was still deeply estranged from his wife Catherine. In May he finally undertook to establish an informal separation between them. He wanted the whole thing to be discreet, of course, so that there would be no damage to his public reputation. To justify his actions, and to divert any possible suspicions about his growing relationship with Ellen Ternan, he began making some rather disgraceful comments about Catherine in letters to his friends. To Angela Burdett-Coutts, for example, he wrote of his wife: “She has never attached one of them [their children] to herself, never played with them in their infancy, never attracted their confidence as they grew older, never presented herself before them in the aspect of a mother.” This just wasn’t true, but Dickens really seemed to believe it. It was another example of how his imagination always seemed to trump reality.

Dickens’s friends John Forster and Mark Lemon arranged the original separation with Catherine. Her mother, Mrs. Hogarth, attempted to draw up a deed of separation. And then things started to unravel. The Hogarths were threatening to sue Dickens in the Divorce Court – precisely what he was intent on avoiding. A legal settlement was quickly arranged: Catherine would get an annual income of £600; and she would have unlimited access to the couple’s children – as long as there were no lawsuits pursued by either of them against the other. Inevitably, when news of the legal separation emerged, rumours began to circulate about Dickens’s relationship with Ellen Ternan. Foolishly – instead of ignoring the gossip – Dickens got on his high-horse and published a statement in The Times denying that there was any improprieties in his friendship with Ternan. A classic example of “the man doth protest too much.” The public statement did not eliminate the gossip, of course – it encouraged it. The whole affair (pun intended) damaged his reputation and estranged him from many former friends and colleagues. To avoid facing this sort of public scrutiny, Dickens began going down to Gad’s Hill Place regularly in July.



Painting of Dickens by William Powell Frith (1859)

In the New Year of 1859, Charles Dickens sat for a portrait by William Powell Frith. It was commissioned by his closest friend, John Forster. The painting showed Dickens at home in his study. He is wearing a velvet jacket and posed on a chair, in front of his desk. Although the detail cannot be discerned in the painting, the paper propped up on the desk is the opening chapter from his new novel, A Tale of Two Cities. Forster loved the painting; Dickens, as usual, was not fully satisfied. He said his facial expression was that of a man who had just heard that a misfortune had befallen an unfriendly neighbour! To help capture the author’s features, Frith had made use of a photograph of Dickens taken by George Herbert Watkins, a well-known professional photographer, who had done a series of photographs the previous year in his studio on Regent Street. [One of those pictures is seen at the top of this review.] The painting and the photographs revealed a serious man, looking tired after the struggles of a difficult year.





Home of All The Year Round on Wellington St.

One of the major casualties that occurred because of Dickens’s separation from his wife was his relationship with Frederick Evans – one-half of his publishing firm of Bradbury and Evans. Dickens was very upset at Evans’s critical attitude towards him. So he decided to cut his ties with them both. Negotiations began about the copyright to the novels (they had published the previous five) and the fate of the weekly magazine Household Words, which had had a run of nine years. Dickens bought out the rights to it for £3, 550. He determined to set up a new magazine as quickly as possible. It would be called All The Year Round, and would be set up in an office on Wellington Street.

Cover of the first issue of All The Year Round

 Dickens realised that he needed to establish his brand new magazine immediately by jumping straight into a new novel. He still had the rough notes he had written following that episode on the stage in Manchester (when he had been “dying” as Richard Wardour). He soon had a title – A Tale of Two Cities. It was going to be published first as weekly instalments in All The Year Round; and then bound up monthly in the familiar green-covered wrappers. The new weekly was going to look identical to Household Words – with the same size, the same page-format (with two columns), the same drab look (no illustrations), and roughly the same number of articles. He planned for the magazine to include serialised novels, short stories, and topical articles. It would also cost twopence. But, finally, for the very first time, Dickens would have complete control of his periodical; he would be editor and publisher. And his very competent friend, William Henry Wills, would continue to serve as sub-editor. Dickens advertised his new weekly with newspaper ads, handbills, placards and billboards. Because of the tremendous success of A Tale of Two Cities, sales of All The Year Round would never drop below 100,000 copies – amazing, really, given that Household Words had been selling about 35,000 – 40,000 copies.



First monthly binding of A Tale of Two Cities

 The first issue of Dickens’s new weekly, All The Year Round, was released on 30 April, 1859. Dickens had had to work very quickly to get his novel on track for that date. As usual, he wanted to have a head-start on the story, in case any personal or professional problems interfered with his writing. So, when the first edition hit the shops in London, Dickens already had the first three episodes completed. A Tale of Two Cities ran as thirty weekly parts from 30 April until 26 November, 1859. To print his magazine, Dickens went back to his former publishers Chapman and Hall. The illustrations were done by his familiar collaborator, Hablot Knight Browne (‘Phiz’). But Dickens’s relationship with the artist cooled, when Phiz agreed to work on Bradbury and Evans Once A Week – a new magazine set up as a rival to Dickens’s All The Year Round. A Tale of Two Cities would be the last book that Phiz would work on with Boz (Dickens). They had been working together now for 22 years – their first collaboration going all the way back to Dickens’s first novel, Pickwick Papers.

Once Dickens got going on his novel, the writing came fairly easily. As mentioned earlier, Dickens had read Thomas Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution many, many times – in a letter once he claimed to have read it 500 times. Even so, he was keen to get other perspectives and further details of the period. He contacted Carlyle and asked him to recommend some books on the topic. Dickens reported that his friend sent along a couple of “cartloads” of books from his own private library in his home on Cheyne Walk; and he read, or skimmed, most of them. Carlyle came to see Dickens do one of his public readings. He laughed vigorously throughout. When he went backstage after the performance to offer his compliments, he told Dickens, “Charley, you carry a whole company of actors under your hat.” When A Tale of Two Cities was first released in book form, Dickens dedicated it to Carlyle in gratitude for his “wonderful book”, his history of the Revolution.

"The Storming of the Bastille" - a painting by Jean-Pierre Houël (1789)

By the middle of May, Dickens was a complete “slave” to the new novel. He moved down to his house at Gad’s Hill Place in Kent for the entire summer of 1859, in order to work steadily on it. He set up a new routine. He wrote for his usual four or five hours per day from Wednesday to Monday; then he would travel to London on Monday afternoon, in order to work at the All The Year Round office all day Tuesday – returning to Kent on Tuesday evening. His focus on the novel was so intense that he finished it by early October, almost two months ahead of its final weekly instalment. Unlike most of his books, A Tale of Two Cities was built on story and incident, rather than character and dialogue – it was the momentum of its dramatic story that constantly propelled him forward.



1958 British film production of A Tale of Two Cities - directed by Ralph Thomas, starring Dirk Bogarde

Dickens’s attitude to the French Revolution was typical of the English liberal of the day. He believed that the oppression of the aristocracy – the ancien régime – had established the conditions which pushed the peasants into revolt. Back in the mid 1840s, Dickens had written in The Examiner magazine that the revolution “was a struggle on the part of the people for social recognition and existence.” A philosophy of freedom and equality had overthrown a feudal despotism. During the immediate aftermath of the rebellion, Romantic writers in England had celebrated its early effects. Wordsworth, for example, had famously declared of those heady days: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive; but to be young was very heaven!” But then came Robespierre and the brutal excesses of the Terror. Dickens’s book would reflect this ambivalent response to the Revolution – condemnation of the old order, but horror at the virulence of the later violence.

"The Sea Rises" by 'Phiz' (1859)



A Tale of Two Cities is a historical novel, only the second of Dickens’s career – the first had been Barnaby Rudge, a book focused on the anti-Catholic riots of 1780 in London. Barnaby Rudge had been a much more discursive book – typical of his early works, which were usually issued in monthly parts. The novels written in weekly parts were not as flabby – they usually contained a smaller cast of characters, and had a more direct story, with fewer sub-plots. A Tale of Two Cities fits that mold. It is straightforward, fast-paced, and tense – the excitement of the plot pushes the story forward. What Dickens does is quite brilliant – he compresses the entire, complex history of the Revolution into the story of a single family. Dickens selects several key moments in the Revolution, and shows how they affect the Manette family. Public history becomes private history. He creates vivid and dramatic scenes that embody different aspects of the conflict: the assassination of the cruel Marquis St. Evrémonde, for example, and the storming of the Bastille. As Simon Schama points out, Dickens also creates dramatic moments which not only illustrate a theme, but also suggest a ritualistic, or prophetic, quality. When a barrel of red wine smashes to the ground in the impoverished Parisian district of Saint Antoine, the residents clamber over to the puddles and riverlets, in order to slurp up the precious liquid. The scene emphasises the poverty of the city’s inhabitants, but the red stains all over the people’s hands, chins, and clothing, foreshadow the bloodshed that is to come.

Coach of Marquis De Evrémonde runs down and kills a small child in a Parisian street

There are a lot of dialectics in this novel, a lot of twinning (“best of times, worst of times”): the trial at the Old Baily in London, in the early part of the novel, is balanced by the later trial in Paris, in front of the revolutionary tribunal; the sweet innocence of Lucie Manette is countered by the evil machinations of Madame Defarge; the active intentions of the self-sacrificing Sydney Carton balanced by the passive disinterest of Charles Darnay. There are the twin themes of life and death: characters recalled to life and earning their redemption, whilst others condemn themselves to death and destruction. There are also the twin themes of present and past – how memory links one to the other, and, can lead either to vengeance or reconciliation.

"The Likeness" - lawyer Sydney Carton faces defendant Charles Darnay at the Old Bailey by 'Phiz' (1859)

And then there are the private demons underpinning Dickens’s passionate approach to the novel. The self-sacrifice of the cynical lawyer Sydney Carton echoes the self-sacrificing character of Richard Wardour in Collins’s play The Frozen Deep. Dickens is surely projecting his own feelings and yearnings into these two figures. And it’s not hard to see that Lucie Manette must have been inspired by Dickens’s infatuation with Ellen Ternan. As Dickens is writing this book, she is still the innocent and unattainable ideal of womanhood. And going back to the twining theme in the previous paragraph, Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay might be seen as a doppelgänger reflecting Dickens’s twin-nature at this time. As Charles Darnay (same initials as Dickens!), he is the successful suitor of the innocent young woman, but disinterested and rather misunderstood; as Sydney Carton he is the troubled, unrequited, self-mocking ironist who sacrifices his life for the unattainable woman that he loves.

An out-door production of A Tale of Two Cities by the Dickensian Tabard Players
at The George Inn in Southwark (1949)

A Tale of Two Cities, of all Dickens’s mature work, has always opened the widest gap in appreciation between critics and readers. The general public has always loved the book – it is one of the author’s most popular novels. Literary critics, until more recently, have rarely given the book its due. They tend to offer lukewarm equivocations: it is called “uneven”, “clumsy”, and “melodramatic”. It certainly doesn’t have the complex density of a book like Bleak House. But it does have several intertwining motifs that serve as potent symbols or metaphors – without slowing down the accelerating momentum of the plot. A Tale of Two Cities is undoubtedly the most dramatic of Dickens’s novels. So dramatic, in fact, that it was very soon adapted for the London stage,  adapted by Tom Taylor for the Lyceum Theatre, although – truth be told – it was Dickens who pretty much directed the production.

A Tale of Two Cities is not a difficult read. In some ways, it’s actually rather accessible: a comparatively short book (by Dickens’s standard!), a story of romantic longing, with an uplifting and melodramatic ending. A real page-turner. If you wanted to introduce a young reader to the marvels of Dickens, this – or perhaps Oliver Twist – might be the place to start. But it is also a rather dark work – crammed with images of horror and destruction, and scenes of disease, dirt, poverty, imprisonment and execution. The mood overall is one of fatigue, decay and despondency – reflecting, perhaps, Dickens’s emotional turmoil. Here was a man, in some ways, in anticipation of death, but still clinging to the hope of a new love, a new redemption – a man desperate to be recalled to life.



"Congratulations" - Charles Darnay is acquited, thanks to the ruse of Sydney Carton  by 'Phiz' (1859)

[2012 is the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens. Lots of special events and activities are planned in England this year. Back in 2009, my good friend Tony Grant (in Wimbledon, UK) and I did a pilgrimage to three key Charles Dickens destinations - his birthplace in Portsmouth (the house is a Museum), the house he lived at on Doughty Street in London (now the chief Dickens' museum), and the town he lived in as a child on the north-coast of Kent (Rochester). 

These visits inspired me to begin reading through all Dickens's novels. By last summer I had done six, but stalled in the middle of Dombey and Son. I thought what I could do to mark this special year of Dickens was to start again, read through all of his novels inside the year, and blog about them. So this is the thirteenth of a series.]

Next: Great Expectations

[Resources used: "Introduction" to A Tale of Two Cities by Simon Schama (1990); Dickens by Peter Ackroyd (1990); "Portraits of Charles Dickens (1812-1870)", an excellent web-page collection of Dickens pictures.  Dickens Portraits ]

Photo Essay: The Homes of Charles Dickens



Dickens' changing signature - a display in the Charles Dickens Museum
 at 48 Doughty Street in London

Charles Dickens was born on 7 February 1812; he died on 9 June 1870. During his life he lived in a lot of different homes – nearly all of which are no longer standing. But there are three key houses in England that the Dickens enthusiast should visit – as my friend Tony Grant and I did back in the summer of 2009. This photo essay (my photos throughout) provides a tour of each of those three houses.

Portsmouth – 393, Old Commercial Road

Old Commercial Road in Portsmouth - Dickens's Birthplace Museum near the end (on the left)

On this Dickens pilgrimage, why not start at the beginning? Go to Portsmouth, where his life began. It is miraculous, really, that the house still stands. Not only has it survived many extensive changes and redevelopments in the area; it even emerged unscathed from heavy World War Two bombing of the city – Portsmouth had been an important military port. But there it still is. It’s a fairly quick drive down there from London – about a hundred kilometres south-west of the capital on the south-coast of Hampshire. Or you could take the train down from Victoria Station.

Entrance of Dickens's Birthplace Museum in Portsmouth

When the small, terraced, brick house was built it was situated outside the city, in the suburb of Landport – a new suburb built in the 1790s. The area was known then as Mile End, or New Town. The original address had it located at No. 13, Mile End Terrace. Charles’s parents, John and Elizabeth Dickens, moved into the house during the summer of 1809. It was the first house the newly-married couple rented. Dickens’s father had moved down from London to work in the Portsmouth dockyard; he worked on the payroll accounts at the Navy Pay Office, earning an annual salary of £110. Charles’s eldest sister Frances (Fanny) was born there in 1810; and Charles, the second child, was born about two years later, on 7 February 1812. His father was twenty-seven; his mother was twenty-two. It was a Friday; and Friday became a day of omen for Charles Dickens – sometimes good, sometimes bad! His mother used to say that she went to a ball on the night before his birth, but this is now considered to be one of several apocryphal stories surrounding the great one’s early childhood. Three weeks after Charles’s birth, his parents took the infant to the church of St. Mary’s Kingston, where he was christened on 4 March as Charles John Huffam Dickens – Charles after a maternal grandfather, John for his father, and Huffam for a London friend of his father. Huffam was also chosen as godfather to the child.

View into back garden from the back room on the first-floor

The house at Mile End was a modest dwelling. It was set in a semi-rural neighbourhood. His parents could now consider themselves members of the middle class. The house eventually got swallowed up by the city. When you visit it today, you’ll find it in the Southsea district of Portsmouth. And the address has changed; it’s now located at No. 393, Old Commercial Road and hosts the Charles Dickens’s Birthplace Museum.

Period plates (Regency) on a period sideboard

It’s strange that, despite his intense nostalgia for his childhood years - he would write about it later in several of his novels - Dickens never had any sentimental interest in his birthplace. One time he wrote this about it: “I can’t say I usually care much about it.” In fact, he did try to make a visit here once with a friend. But he couldn’t find its exact location. No Google Maps back then!

Drawing Room in the ground-floor front

The house has a small garden in the front and the back. The building includes two storeys, a basement, and an attic. In the Dickens’s time, it had a kitchen and washroom in the basement, a dining room and parlour on the ground floor, two bedrooms on the first floor, and two small garret rooms at the top of the house. There was no running water for the entire terrace; each unit had an outhouse in the back garden.

Tony displays the old Museum sign stored in the garret

The bedroom in which Charles was born – the front room on the first floor – has two windows which look out over the small front garden. At the time, the house looked out over Cherry Garden Field – with Portsmouth Harbour visible off in the distance.

Bedroom on first floor front - Charles Dickens was born here (not the original bed, but it's a period piece)

The house was furnished in the sparse, pre-Victorian, Regency style: the wooden floors occasionally covered with area-rugs, and the rather plain rooms were illuminated by oil lamps or candles. There are no original Dickens possessions here from their time in the house, but the museum has set up three fully-furnished rooms – parlour, dining room, and front bedroom – with genuine Regency furniture and household items that they have collected over the years. They do have the adult Dickens’s snuff box, inkwell and paper-knife. More importantly, in the back room on the first floor, they have the couch from Gad’s Hill Place upon which Charles Dickens died. On the wall above the couch is a large, framed copy of his death certificate.

The couch that Dickens died on at Gad's Hill Place, near Rochester, Kent on 9 June, 1870

Charles Dickens collapsed in the dining room of Gad’s Hill Place on 8 June 1870. Only his sister-in-law, Georgina, was with him at the time. He fell unconscious to the floor at about 6 p.m. The local doctor was summoned. He had Dickens moved from the floor onto a couch, which had been carried down to the dining room from upstairs. He died on the couch at about 6.15 p.m. on 9 June 1870, twenty-four hours after he had collapsed.

Copy of Charles Dickens's Death Certificate

When Charles was five-months old, the Dickens family had to move to a smaller house on a poorer road called Hawk Street. They were already in financial difficulty. Eighteen months later their prospects improved somewhat, and they moved to a better residence at 39 Wish Street in Portsea. That winter John Dickens was summoned to work at Somerset House in London. They left Portsmouth, Dickens later recalled, in the midst of a snowfall – and never returned.

Looking towards the front door

The Charles Dickens Birthplace Museum is located in Portsmouth at 393 Old Commercial Road. It is open daily there (except Mondays) between mid-April and September from 10.00 – 5.30. Admission is £4 for adults, £3.50 for senior citizens, and £3 for children and students.
 

 

 

London – 48, Doughty Street

Charles Dickens had been renting a house at Furnival’s Inn in Holborn, central London from 1834-1837, when he decided it was time to find a larger place for his growing family. He and his wife Catherine had been married now just over a year. Dickens was so busy at the time that he hired house agents to find a house, while he and Mary Hogarth, his sister-in-law, also did some looking around, inspecting available premises.

Doughty Street (to the right) in Central London

The house at 48 Doughty Street was found fairly soon. He made an offer for the place on 18 March, 1837, agreeing to a three-year lease at a rent of £80 per annum. He got his publisher, Richard Bentley, to give him an advance of £100 to cover the various moving expenses. He and his family moved in two weeks later – 31 March 1837.

Outside the front of 48 Doughty Street where Dickens lived (1837-1839)

The house on Doughty Street was located in a row of terraced houses built in the late-1700s. It was a typical brick house of the late Georgian period, an attractive home located in a quiet, private road, with a gateway manned by a porter on each end, in order to keep out undesirables. The area, at the time, was on the fringes of respectable London. Just east of Doughty Street ran the rather squalid Gray’s Inn Road, along which cattle were driven towards the Smithfield Market. But then to the north and west lay the posh squares and terraces of the estates of the Foundling Hospital and the Duke of Bedford. This house was bigger and grander than anything he had ever lived in with his parents. To help run the household, he employed a cook, a housemaid, a nurse, and a manservant.

48 Doughty Street was a three-storey house with twelve rooms. It also included a basement, an attic, and a small garden at the back of the house. There was a dining room and a back parlour on the ground floor. Dickens’s study was on the first floor – at the back of the house, overlooking the garden. Next to the study was the family’s drawing room, at the front of the building. On the second floor were two bedrooms.



Drawing Room at Doughty Street - Dickens always preferred
the Regency/William IV style to the early Victorian look

Dickens made changes to the house. He had the woodwork trim painted pink. A veined marble fireplace-hearth was installed in the drawing room. Bright-coloured carpets and rugs were added to many of the rooms. And he had a complete set of “standard novels” added to the shelves in the study. Dickens loved brightness in the family rooms; so he installed mirrors throughout the house. They reflected the light and improved the rather gloomy mood created by oil lamps and candles. Dickens continued to favour furniture and fittings of the Regency and William IV style. He preferred them to the rather drab style of the early and mid-Victorian period. Domestic order was very important to him. Before he could start work in his study each day, for example, he would tidy the room – making sure all the furniture and fittings were was set in their proper place.



The bed Mary Hogarth (his wife's younger sister) died in early May 1837

During his tenure at Doughty Street, Charles Dickens finished writing The Pickwick Papers; he also wrote in their entirety Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby. The move to Doughty Street was a mark of Dickens’s eminence now in the literary world. And he did much lavish entertaining in the house – many friends noted with astonishment the amount of effort and money he put into these dinner-parties and celebrations.



Hallway near the front door

The time spent at Doughty Street was a happy and prosperous period for the family, except for the dramatic death there of Mary Hogarth, the sister of Dickens’s wife Catherine. It happened only five weeks after they had moved in. The three of them had been out one evening to the St. James Theatre, to see a performance of the play Is She His Wife?, written by Charles. When they got home and were preparing for bed, Mary collapsed. She never recovered, dying in Dickens’s arms the next afternoon. She was only 17 years old. Dickens was devastated and his grief lasted for many months.

Eventually, Doughty Street also became too small for the growing family – by the end of 1839, they had three children. Dickens found a new place within a week of beginning his search – it was a large house at 1, Devonshire Terrace, just south of Regent’s Park. They moved there in December, 1839.




My friend, Tony Grant, signs the Visitor's Book in the basement library, which houses the museum's extensive collection of original Dickens publications (books and magazines)

The Dickens Fellowship – founded in 1902 – decided to acquire 48 Doughty Street, in order to establish a museum to the great writer. Through the efforts primarily of the Fellowship’s founder, B. W. Matz, they launched a fundraising campaign in 1923 to raise the £10,000 needed to buy and endow the building. The Lord Mayor joined the campaign and called upon Londoners to help “preserve one of the most valuable literary relics of our time.” The Charles Dickens Museum was opened in the house on 9 June 1925.




The opening of the Museum at Doughty Street on 9 June, 1925

The Charles Dickens Museum contains the world’s most important collection of paintings, manuscripts, rare editions, original furniture and other items relating to his life and work. Perhaps the best-known article on display is the painting “Dickens’ Dream” by R. W. Buss. After almost a year-long renovation and refurbishment of the building at 48 Doughty Street, the Museum will reopen on 10 December 2012. Admission to the museum: £8 for adults; £4 for children 6-16 years; and Free for children under 6 yrs.



The museum owns the original painting (unfinished) "Dickens' Dream" by R.W. Buss

Higham, Kent (near Rochester) – Gad’s Hill Place

After about a year working in London (1816), when Dickens was a four-year old lad, his father was posted out to the north coast of Kent in early 1817 – first to Sheerness (in January), then to Chatham (in April), and finally to Rochester, where they lived on Ordnance Terrace for four years. When he was living there, a very young Charles Dickens often walked up the hill from Rochester on the Rochester-Gravesend Road that led towards London. It was a favourite hike of his. At the top of the hill, in the village of Higham, was a large house known as Gad’s Hill Place. Whenever he was passing the place with walking companions, he would invariably reminisce with them about the time when his father had first pointed out the house to him. “I used to look at it as a wonderful mansion (which God knows it is not) when I was a very odd little child,” he wrote; “I can recollect my father, seeing me so fond of it, had often said to me, ‘If you were to be persevering and were to work hard, you might someday come to live in it’.” And he did; he bought the house 36 years later.



Gad's Hill Place, near Rochester in Kent, where Dickens lived for his last 15 years (1855-1870)

At the beginning of February 1855 – as I wrote in my recent review of Little Dorrit – Dickens heard that Gad’s Hill Place was up for sale. He was interested, but before he could follow up on that interest, he was distracted for a while by a brief interlude with a former teenage love of his, Maria Beadnell. Much later in the year – in November – Dickens decided to buy the house. He paid £1,790 for it. He thought of it at first as an investment; he planned to rent it out, and to continue living in London in Tavistock House. He also toyed with the idea of using Gad’s Hill Place as a summer residence – living there with the family for a few months in the middle of each year, renting it out for the rest.



Antique post box next to Gad's Hill Place

Dickens called Gad’s Hill Place “old-fashioned, plain and comfortable.” It wasn’t at all grand, and not even that large. Tavistock House was more impressive. It was important to him more for what it meant – a symbol of the social position and financial success he yearned for during his problematic childhood. It was a three-storey, red-brick house built in the Queen Anne period. There was a bell-turret on top of the roof. From that roof, it was possible to see north as far as the River Thames; to the south and east, you could see Rochester and the valley of the Medway; and to the north-east you could look out over the flat and bleak coastal marshes. Outside the house there was a large, wooden porch complete with seats and pillars.

The rooms inside Gad Hill’s Place were relatively small. On the ground floor there was a drawing room, a dining room, a study, and a billiards room. The study was changed a couple of times – eventually it was located to the right side of the entrance hall, where he could gaze out of the windows into the garden. The first floor featured Dickens’s bedroom – its windows looked out towards the village of Strood.



The horse-drawn pump that brought up Dickens' water from the bottom of a 217-feet deep well. Moved later to Rochester - it's in the garden behind Eastgate House (near the Swiss chalet).

It took Dickens quite a while to get used to the quiet of this rural house. In fact, in the early days, it quite unnerved him. And then several major problems with the house emerged – particularly with the water supply and the drainage. The water supply was insufficient to satisfy the needs of the family – after a long process of trial-and-error, it was decided that a large pump would have to be built on the premises. A large team of workers was hired, and they began boring holes in the garden, digging up various flowerbeds in order to lay new pipes, and building new cesspools beneath the garden lawns. They had to dig down 217 feet in order to reach a sufficient supply of spring water, which had to be pumped up daily by a mechanism driven, literally, by horse-power! Dickens spent a lavish £200 on all this work.



The Swiss chalet  given as a Christmas gift to Dickens by Charles Fechter in 1864

For the Christmas of 1864, Dickens’s friend Charles Fechter – an actor first in France, and then in London – bought him a genuine Swiss Chalet. It had been disassembled and shipped to Gad’s Hill Place in 94 pieces, packed into 58 large boxes. Dickens attempted to begin work assembling the structure, with help from Fechter, family members, and several visiting friends. Finally, Fechter had his carpenter come down to Kent from London, to take charge of the project. It was much bigger than anyone had anticipated – a real chalet with two floors. Dickens decided to erect it on a piece of land he owned across from Gad’s Hill Place – on the other side of the Rochester High Road, that ran past his property.

The tunnel dug under the road;
it led to Dickens's Swiss chalet.

Eventually, Dickens had a small tunnel excavated under the road, so that he could get from his house to the chalet without being disturbed by curious onlookers. The chalet became his writing study during the spring and summer months from 1865 until his death in 1870. He liked how bright it was – and he increased that brightness by installing a bank of mirrors along one wall of the chalet’s upper room. After his death, the chalet was given to Lord Darnley and kept in Cobham Park.

Dickens’s Swiss chalet is now crammed into the gardens of Eastgate House, just off the old High Street in Rochester. The Rochester and Chatham branch of the Dickens Fellowship (founded in 1903) has mounted a campaign to raise £100,000 to preserve the chalet. There are large numbers of the wooden boards that are rotting away, and the chalet can no longer be safely entered. It has been determined that the chalet will need to be carefully dismantled and every single board will have to be carefully examined and, if necessary, replaced. Then the entire structure will require treatment to protect it against future rot. The current brick footings will have to be replaced, in order to provide the chalet a more solid foundation.





Tony beside the school sign for the Gad's Hill School (located partly in Gad's Hill Place)

After Dickens’s death in 1870, his oldest child, Charley, bought Gad’s Hill Place for £8,600, but he was forced to give it up in 1879 because of ill-health. In 1924 the house became the home of Gad’s Hill School. The headmaster of the school announced a few years ago that they planned to construct a new building for the school and to turn Gad’s Hill Place into a Dickens museum.



Dickens seated at his desk in the study at Gad's Hill Place - engraving by Samuel Hollyer (ca. 1875)

Resources used: Charles Dickens: A Life (2011) by Claire Tomalin; Dickens (1990) by Peter Ackroyd