Charles Dickens museum reopens after £3m restoration

A Lottery-backed project has transformed Dickens's London home. The museum is due to reopen next Monday.

           

When visitors arrive at the museum, they will find the author's shadow painted on the staircase wall to guide their way into the museum.

Dickens rented the house in Doughty Street for three years at £80 a year, and moved in in 1837 as a young husband with his new wife, Catherine Hogarth, and their first child, soon to be followed by two more. It was in this house that he made his name, publishing Nicholas Nickleby under his own name.

A £3.1m Heritage Lottery-backed restoration has transformed the building, opening the house next door as visitor facilities and incorporating a lift, giving disabled access for the first time to the basement and upper floors.

In the drawing room, where Dickens regularly entertained friends with performances from his works, visitors can sit on the sofa and hear the voice of the actor Simon Callow reading his words.

The back bedroom is shadowed by death, where his 17-year-old sister-in-law died in his arms, inspiring many deathbed scenes in his novels. On the walls there is a photograph acquired three weeks ago, of the scene of the Staplehurst train crash in 1865. Dickens, unhurt in the crash in which 19 people died, helped rescue many of those who were injured.

The attic is open to visitors for the first time, here they will find a barred window from the long since demolished Marshalsea prison. Where a 12 year old Dickens was imprisoned with the rest of his family when his father’s reckless spending got the family into debt.

The house was saved from modernisation by becoming a shabby boarding house, and then saved from demolition by public subscription, it became a museum in Dicken’s honour in 1925.

The one thing that may surprise visitors is that the house now doesn't look particularly Dickensian. The architect Dante Vanoli explained the restoration as "cleansing", removing layers of later alterations, rescuing original floorboards from under 20th-century lino, and taking out doors inserted in 1925 that gave parts of the building a Tudor appearance.

The house where Dickens invented the traditional Victorian Christmas is to be the only museum in the capital open on Christmas Day.

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Source: The Guardian 

Image: Lin Pernille Photography