London, Dickens House Museum, 1.10.05

We finished up our Saturday morning’s literary walk at the Dickens House Museum. It’s a small house, four floors including below stairs, so it must have been cramped if that’s where he had his numerous children. But I think not – I recall a TV series about him living in a rather grander house somewhere in the country, where he decamped after abandoning his wife, poor Mrs Charles Dickens, who doesn’t even warrant a name of her own under her portrait.
It’s the only surviving building that he actually lived in, though there are plaques elsewhere in Bloomsbury because he moved about a bit. The museum has mostly framed illustrations and portraits of him (copies of the real thing are in the National Portrait Gallery) but the morning room is reasonably authentic and so is the washroom and the cellar. Anyway, I liked it and bought a small bronze bust for the library.
After a rather ordinary pub lunch at Shakespeare’s Head Hotel in Camden, we took the bus to the National Gallery…