Page 5 - PBCOctober2019

Pickwick Bicycle Club Magazine Volume 16 No.2 October 2019 !5

The Pickwickians visit the Charles Dicken’s
Museum in London

In early April, a gathering of 12 club members plus guests entered 48
Doughty St., the Victorian home of Charles Dickens, for whom we have to
thank for our existence. Apart from writing Oliver Twist & Nicholas
Nickelby there, he completed Pickwick Papers in this house.

We were welcomed by Cindy Sughrue – curator & director of the museum and her team,
and she gave us an initial overview of the Dickens’s life there before we made our tour. The
current theme was Food, Glorious Food (Oliver Twist) since the family hosted dinners &
parties for many leading figures of the period. It seemed quite appropriate for those of
the Pickwick Bicycle Club.

Charles & Catherine (nee Hogarth) moved into the Georgian Doughty St residence in early
1837 & raised their three eldest of ten children there. The house is actually two linked
properties, so quite spacious and befitting of an
increasingly established writer of that period. Charles
younger brother Frederick, and Catherine’s young sister
Mary came to live with them at their home and help with
caring for the children.

The museum covers his whole life rather than just at
Doughty St., and so the house holds a cornucopia of family
furniture, clothing, paintings and personal possessions. His
study, located in the centre of the house, includes the
desk where he wrote a great number of newspaper
articles, essays, short stories and of course his novels,
often written by candle light and always with a quill pen.

Cindy gave us an excellent understanding of the life of Dickens, both as a family man and
of his working life, and she highlighted several links to our Club with memorabilia in the
museum. Of course one quite significant point of interest for us all, was that we were able
to see the ‘missing’ portrait of Dickens which had recently been acquired by the museum
with help of a donation from the Pickwick BC.