Last week my mother-in-law and I visited the Charles Dickens Museum. It is located in the only remaining London home of Dickens (the house where he was born in Portsmouth is also still standing).
The house is set up how it would have looked when Dickens lived there, including very minimal lighting which made it hard to read the descriptions of some of the objects.
The kitchen area in the basement looked as if food items had just been delivered. There was also a copper pot for washing laundry that would have also been used to boil puddings at Christmas, a detail Dickens mentioned in A Christmas Carol when he writes, "...while the two young Cratchits hustled Tiny Tim, and bore him off into the wash-house, that he might hear the pudding singing in the copper."
The rooms on the main floor focused on Dickens love of entertaining and especially how he would do readings and act out stories from his books. The dinner table was set up with names and descriptions of his friends and frequent dinner invitees.
Upstairs in the nursery were items from Dickens' youth and the years he spent working at a young age. The photo below shows a grille from Marshalsea Debtors Prison where Charles's father, mother, and siblings were imprisoned in 1824.
While his family was in Marshalsea, the 12 year old Charles Dickens worked at Warren's Blacking Factory near Charing Cross in London. He would work ten hour days putting labels on jars of boot polish. Charles's mother forced him to continue working at the factory even after his father's release from prison because the family's financial situation was still dire.
The museum also had a pantry window about the size of the one Bill Sikes had Oliver Twist crawl through during the robbery of the country house. It was so tiny, I see why he needed a small young person to fit through.
The museum featured a special exhibit on Dickens last and unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. I'd never heard of this novel before but now I am very curious about reading it (it is a free download on iBooks). The crime novelist Patricia Cornwall even wrote her own ending to this unsolved mystery.
They always say: write what you know. With all his success we can see why. Oliver Twist must've been almost an autobiography.
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