Dickens and London exhibition guide

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Dickens

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150 London Wall

LondonE

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Am

usements

of the People

FILM

ENTRA

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EXIT

FIREEXIT

A C

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agination

Hom

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earth

INTRO

FIRE EXIT

Dickens and

the Modern A

ge

In Life and D

eath

David C

opperfieldm

anuscript

The Mystery of Edw

in Drood

manuscript

Dom

bey and Sonm

anuscript

Dom

bey and Sonm

anuscript

Great Expectations

manuscript

Bleak House

manuscript

Exhibition plan

The Houseless Shadow – a film by William Raban

Inspired by one of Dickens’s finest essays, ‘Night Walks’, first published in 1860, this film portrays London at night and explores the rhythms, sounds and shadows of today’s city.

‘Not being a creature of the night myself, I was challenged by the task of retracing the great man’s footsteps, setting off after midnight and returning “in the small hours” to observe and capture London districts and their insomniac communities. The first task was to become invisible so that I could film without people becoming affronted by the camera. I carried the equipment in a large supermarket bag, pulling the tripod behind me strapped to a luggage trolley. I blended with the other houseless people of the night and soon they became my friends. Filmed over five months, when luck was on my side, I returned with good shots; at other times, I came back with nothing – such are the fortunes of street cinematography.’

William Raban, October 2011

Dickens’s Victorian London bookOver 200 archive photographs – most of which have never been published before – illustrate this mesmerising guide to Victorian London as seen through the eyes of Charles Dickens.

The book is available from the Museum shop or at www.museumoflondonshop.co.uk£25 RRP, available for the special price of £20 during the exhibition run.

Dickens: Dark London appThe Museum of London has launched a new iPhone and iPad app which takes users on a journey through the darker side of Dickens’s London. Beautifully imagined by illustrator David Foldvari, this graphic novel follows Dickens on his night walks of

London. Actor Mark Strong gives voice to Dickens as passages from his works provide vivid descriptions of the Victorian capital. Bonus material featuring illustrated excerpts of some of Dickens’s most famous novels also bring the 19th century city to life. Drawn from a selection of his short stories, Dickens: Dark London will be published monthly throughout the exhibition. The first edition is available now free of charge from iTunes. Each subsequent edition will be available to download for £1.49.

Dickens and London printsPrints of a selection of photographs, featured in the exhibition and the accompanying publication Dickens’s Victorian London, can be purchased from our print-on-demand touch screen in the shop foyer and from www.museumoflondonprints.com

Dickens’s Legacy

Today, 200 years after his birth, Charles Dickens is acknowledged as the first, and arguably greatest, modern urban novelist. His writings form a giant atlas of the life of the metropolis. Dickens and London are indelibly bound together.

Dickens tracks a changing society in an industrial age. Many aspects of his work are profoundly unsettling, especially his insistent descriptions of the terrible living conditions of the poor, whose sufferings were largely ignored.

Dickens’s ultimate aim was to reform and improve society. He attacked financial fraud, Government incompetence, ‘red tape’ (a term that he invented) and inadequate education. Sadly, inequalities and poverty still exist in London, still blighting lives. Dickens’s words still challenge us today:

‘I saw that not one miserable wretch breathed out his poisoned life in the deepest cellar of the most neglected town, but, from the surrounding atmosphere, some particles of his infection were borne away, charged with heavy retribution on the general guilt.’

From ‘A December Vision’, Household Words, 1850

‘Day after day, such travellers crept past, but always, as she thought, in one direction—always towards the town. Swallowed up in one phase or other of its immensity, towards which they seemed impelled by a desperate fascination, they never returned. Food for the hospitals, the churchyards, the prisons, the river, fever, madness, vice, and death,—they passed on to the monster, roaring in the distance, and were lost.’

Dombey and Son, Chapter 33

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round Britain by stage coach. Later in life, as a celebrity author, he sped from place to place by train. He travelled so frequently that the jarring and shaking of the carriages made him ill. He was the first author to describe the railway’s impact on society, the city and the countryside. As a prolific letter-writer, Dickens made full use of the Penny Post, which was introduced in 1840. He kept in touch with friends and family by letter and responded to fans or people asking for money.

In Life and Death

It was only after Dickens’s death that the traumatic events of his childhood became known to the world. His friend and biographer John Forster revealed how in 1824, at the age of 12, Dickens was sent to work in a blacking (boot polish) factory. He experienced such profound ‘grief and humiliation’ that he was scarred for the rest of his life. It was only after his father’s release from the Marshalsea debtors’ prison that the ordeal ended. Dickens’s work is charged with death and tragedy, often involving children. The death of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop sent the nation into mourning. Such episodes linked back to Dickens’s own lost childhood, as well as the death of his much-loved sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth. In his final years, Dickens

embarked on a series of well-paid reading tours. He loved performing in front of his public. But the readings took a terrible toll on his health. Nightly, he re-enacted the scene from Oliver Twist where Bill Sikes murders Nancy. The intensity left him physically drained and probably contributed to his early death at the age of 58.

Home and Hearth

For Victorians, the home was a sacred place, promising domestic bliss, harmony and security. Dickens himself aspired to this ideal when, as a young man, he set up his own home in London. In A Christmas Carol, Dickens presents the Cratchit family contentedly settled round the fire after dining on turkey and plum pudding. However, his stories can show the harsh side of domestic life. Many of his families have a general air of unhappiness. Some of the strongest family relationships that Dickens describes do not involve parents: Joe Gargery and Pip in Great Expectations are uncle and nephew; Captain Cuttle and Florence Dombey in Dombey and Son are not related at all. In 1850 Dickens launched a new weekly magazine called Household Words. He wanted to ‘live in the Household affections, and to be numbered among the Household thoughts’

of his readers. His mission was to instil a sense of Christian charity and compassion for the poor. His own charitable works included Urania Cottage in West London, a home for destitute young women.

Dickens and London

Charles Dickens takes us right into the beating heart of the metropolis. London was the world’s first modern city. He reveals it in all its complexity, movement and energy. We hear its hum and lively chatter. We are shown its squalor and drabness, its extremes of wealth and poverty.

Dickens burst onto the literary scene in the mid 1830s. His work stood out from the rest. It seemed to capture the mood of the period. His writings had a distinctive feel and pace with a lively use of language and vivid characterisation. Within a few years, Dickens was a celebrity and the latest instalments of his novels were eagerly awaited at home and abroad.

What drove Dickens’s imagination and creativity? This exhibition celebrates London as his muse. He called the city his ‘magic lantern’. He described the new urban consciousness and the experiences of ordinary people. Walter Bagehot described Charles Dickens as London’s ‘special correspondent for posterity’.

A City of Imagination

Dickens was an insomniac and needed little sleep. He thought nothing of walking the streets of London all night long. Through such regular excursions, he developed an encyclopaedic knowledge of London’s geography. Dickens had an extraordinary visual memory. He described his mind as a ‘sort of capitally prepared and highly sensitive [photographic] plate’. The variety and complexity of the city fed his creativity. As he walked, he mapped out the intricate storylines of his novels. Just as his fictional characters made their way from one place to another, so he followed in their footsteps across the real city.

Dickens also listened closely to sounds, especially overheard conversations. He was a master at distinguishing dialect, intonation and word pattern, a skill that made the voices of his characters ring true.

Amusements of the People

Above all, Dickens set out to amuse his readers. This he certainly did: his dynamic and exuberant way with words made him the most popular writer since Shakespeare.

Dickens saw the London theatre as an escape from the toil and drabness of everyday urban life. It was a ‘fairy land’, a place full of enchantment, excitement and colour. As a boy, his imagination had been fired up by a visit to a Christmas pantomime at Sadler’s Wells. And as a young man he nearly became an actor, but was laid up in bed with a bad cold on the day of his audition. All his life he remained an actor at heart. Dickens was also a skilled stage-manager, arranging private theatrical performances for friends, and even for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1857.

Dickens and the Modern Age

Dickens felt that he was living in a special age of progress and improvement. He called it ‘this summer-dawn of time’. He wanted his journalism to convey ‘the social wonders’ of the age, ‘both good and evil’. His writings reflect the scale of global trade flowing through Victorian London and the impact of the British Empire on people’s lives. Indeed, his own sons emigrated to Canada, India and Australia. Dickens embraced new technology. For his first reading tour of the United States in 1842, he crossed the Atlantic on a steamship. As a young reporter he travelled

Highlights: Astley’s amphitheatre panel, Grimaldi clown outfit, toy theatre model.

Highlights: Furnival’s Inn watchman’s box, Newgate prison door, Bleak House manuscript, accents and dialects audio interactive, stereoscopic viewers.

Highlights: Dickens’s Dream paintingby Robert William Buss, Dickens’s writing desk and chair, Dombey and Son manuscript, first edition of A Christmas Carol, replica partwork of Nicholas Nickleby for handling.

Highlights: David Copperfield manuscript, touch objects, replica partwork of David Copperfield for handling, Dickens’s reading desk.

Highlights: Great Expectations manuscript, The Mystery of Edwin Drood manuscript, Dombey and Son manuscript, stagecoach model, Stanford’s map of London 1862.

‘…the great heart of London throbs in its Giant breast. Wealth and beggary, vice and virtue, guilt and innocence, repletion and the direst hunger, all treading on each other and crowding together, are gathered round it. Draw but a little circle above the clustering house-tops, and you shall have within its space, everything with its opposite extreme and contradiction, close beside.’

Master Humphrey’s Clock, 1841