Simon Callow in Dickens' study

1837 was a kind of annus mirabilis for Charles Dickens.  It was also, as it happens, the year Queen Victoria ascended the throne. Dickens suddenly became internationally famous with his very first novel, The Pickwick Papers. It made him famous and it made him rich, by his own standards anyway, and he was able to move out of his cramped quarters in chambers at Furnivall’s Inn, where he was living with his wife and his young son, and they moved to this much grander establishment, 48 Doughty Street.  It was a definite step up in the world for him. 

This is the study at Doughty Street, where Dickens completed Pickwick Papers while at the same time writing Oliver Twist, which was immediately followed by Nicholas Nickleby.  An almost unbelievable torrent of creativity.

This here is an incredibly rare page of The Pickwick Papers itself as written by Dickens here, in this room, in this very house, with a quill very much like this one, if not this one, under the eyes of his mascot, Monkey, which he liked to have with him on his desk as he wrote. While he was writing he was incredibly animated. Sometimes he would leap up from the table and look at himself in the mirror, because like an actor he would become possessed by the characters.  He’d see what was on his face, the expression, and then he’d go down to the desk and describe it in words.  He wrote incredibly vigorously. You can see his…the quill must have really driven into the page.

So this is the social centre of the house.  This is the hearth, this is where the family lived most of the time, and this where they had their splendid Dickensian repasts supervised very well by Kate, Dickens’s young wife. And after the meal, Dickens would very typically stand up and do impersonations of the famous actors of the day, tell a couple of jokes, maybe do a conjuring trick, and end up with a couple of comic songs. And right at the centre of all of that fun and ebullience and activity and warmth was Dickens’s sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth: 17 years old, adorable, funny, pretty, vivacious, the apple of Dickens’s eye and pretty well everyone else. 

They had a very lively social life and would often go to events together, to the theatre for example, as they did one night in 1837. Kate Dickens and Charles and his sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, they went to see a play that Dickens himself had written called Is She His Wife. It was a great success; they laughed a great deal; they came back home. Dickens escorted his sister-in-law to her bedroom and left her a few minutes later. He heard a terrible strangled cry from her throat. By morning she was dead at the age of 17. ‘Young, beautiful and good,’ as Dickens said. In a way he never recovered from the loss of Mary Hogarth, whom he absolutely adored, and she’s the model for all those innocent, beautiful girls who meet an early death which happened throughout his novels. And in a way her death casts a sort of a shadow over Dickens’s life here in Doughty Street. In many ways very successful, very lively, but for him always associated with the death of Mary Hogarth. 

By 1839, Dickens was now, with Nickleby under his belt, immensely better off than he had been before. He needed the extra room and so they moved away from here, Doughty Street, to a very grand property in Devonshire Terrace in Marylebone. 

But perhaps this house, Doughty Street, was one of the happiest periods of Dickens’s life, during which he worked on three of his greatest novels in very quick succession, indeed simultaneously, and where his domestic life was probably at its happiest.