The first thing you’ll notice about the Museum of London’s ‘Dickens and London’ exhibition is that it Dickens hardly features. Dickens’ novels and journalism describe the scene, but the man himself is largely unseen — one of many artistic figures in the throng of booming Victorian London.
The Spectator’s obituary praised Dickens’ skill in ‘softening the lines of demarcation between the different classes of English Society.’ But he was not alone in this. Robert Dowling’s ‘Breakfasting Out’ is the best example of a trend in Victorian visual art for showing working people rubbing shoulders with the well to-do in everyday life. Several exhibited paintings suggest that some of this class interaction was nefarious or foolhardy — a fascination of Dickens’. A hundred Nancys are dotted around this exhibition making eyes at raffish Steerforths, while hosts of Mrs Jellabys make ill-advised donations.
Of course, Smike and Oliver Twist are also visible but their representation in these paintings is less sentimental than Dickens’ often saccharine portraits. Luke Fildes’s famous ‘Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward’ shows a line of human misery, while the museum’s collection of photographs take the viewer deeper into the slums.
You might expect the curators to fixate on this obviously Dickensian subject; but, instead, the viewer is taken from the familiar squalor of Fagin’s garret, out into the unknown metropolis. London was the workshop of the world and the capital of cheap entertainment. Dickens claimed to have attended the theatre every night for several years after his fourteenth birthday. The Museum of London has disinterred theatre bills from the 1820s onwards — actors and playwrights who have passed out of collective memory live again on faded hoardings. The theatre remained at the forefront of mass entertainment throughout the century. Dickens’ novels were immediately adapted by hack writers, often without his consent. Profits were guaranteed as audiences flooded to the theatre after a hard day’s graft.
Londoners toiled on the railways, at the dockyards and in commercial offices, of which Dickens wrote so memorably. Paintings, photographs and architectural plans chart the transformation of the city. Buildings fall before the expanding railway; barges flail in the wake of imperious paddle steamers; and Britain’s comprehensive telegraph network is ostentatious next to its parochial European counterparts. Dickens’ accompanying journalism and letters capture the excitement of the period, as do novels such as Dombey and Son with its accounts of the District and Metropolitan railway’s construction.
Dickens’ fascination with London’s modernity was complemented by his preoccupation with family life. His attitude, made clear by the current affairs magazines he edited, was profoundly conservative: a man should work and return to the comforts of home and hearth, which is a euphemism for wife. Clare Tomalin’s peerless biography of Dickens argues that his was the prevailing view, and the curators of this exhibition agree. George Elgar Hicks’ ‘Companion of Manhood’ shows a woman comforting her husband, surrounded by the symbols of fidelity and matrimonial duty. She is, however, as unremarkable as Dora Copperfield — a faceless cipher simpering over the whiskered Argonaut who provides for her. The exhibition does not have space to examine women and motherhood further, which is regrettable because Dickens’ relationship with his mother and estranged wife, and his lifelong penchant for young women, begs further explanation.
The centre-piece of the show is a film retracing Dickens’ steps around London at night, which he originally described in the 1861 essay collection The Uncommercial Traveller. In addition to highlighting the continued being of Want and Ignorance, the film captures Dickens’ genius for evoking place and menace — Bill Sikes lurks around every dark corner. The video alone makes the trip worthwhile.
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