A new museum fully dedicated to Charles Dickens has opened at the celebrated writer’s former home here with an exhibition which explores themes of one of his most famous works A Christ-mas Carol. The Charles Dickens Museum, the house where the author lived with his wife and three children between 1837 and 1839, was opened in Bloomsbury and holds the world’s most comprehensive collection of Dickens-related objects.
The exhibition titled A Christmas Carol Reimagined presented new works by illustration students from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, each inspired by the themes of Dickens’ story, as well as the social situations which provoked him to tell the tale of the Christmas Eve redemption of Ebenezer Scrooge. “Charles Dickens loved celebrating Christmas, both with his family and with the many friends that would visit him at Doughty Street,” said Louisa Price, curator at the Charles Dickens Museum. “His love of Christmas was slightly at odds with the general trend at the time and it is fair to say that he is responsible in quite a significant way for the revival of great public celebrations of Christmas in Britain,” Price said. The exhibition took place at the museum where Dickens completed The Pickwick Papers, wrote Oliver Twist and Nich-olas Nickleby.
A Christmas Carol which chronicles the transformation on Christmas Eve of the miserable and stingy Ebenezer Scrooge into a generous person, was successful when it was first published in 1843. In the exhibition, the only one of his homes in London preserved, there are the original sketches of the drawings by John Leech, who illustrated A Christmas Carol. Considered by many scholars as the best British writer of the nineteenth century, Dickens died in 1870 at the age of 58.
