Dinner with Dickens
The Charles Dickens Museum used its National Lottery Project Grant to create a new family friendly interactive experience. Louisa Price, Curator, tells us more about how their idea came together, their application experience, and how the exhibition went.
Creator of some of the world’s most famous literary characters, Charles Dickens is regarded as the one of the greatest novelists of the Victorian Era.
Founded in 1925 and located in the only surviving family home in London in which Dickens lived, the Charles Dickens Museum holds the world’s most comprehensive collection of material relating to Dickens. It was at 48 Doughty Street, the A Grade 1 listed building the museum now inhabits, that Dickens established himself as a writer in the 1830s, publishing novels such as Oliver Twist, Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby and rising to international fame
With over 100,000 items comprising furniture, personal effects, paintings, prints, photographs, letters, manuscripts, and rare editions, the collection is significant for its breadth and depth into the author’s private world behind the public image. In addition to permanent displays, the Museum presents an ongoing series of temporary exhibitions exploring different aspects of Dickens’ life. It receives 200-300 visitors daily, as well as 50+ school pupils each day during term time.
“We applied for a National Lottery Project Grant so we could dream big and really make the most of the opportunity”, said curator Louisa Price. An upcoming exhibition idea led the museum to apply for an Arts Council National Lottery Project Grant, to explore how they could deliver more family friendly, interactive and accessible exhibitions.
The exhibition, Food Glorious Food: Dinner with Dickens (a reference to Dickens’ second novel, Oliver Twist) was a highly interactive experience – accompanied by an education and engagement programme – examining the significant role of food in Dickens’ life. It looked at Dickens’ writing through the lens of his household and presented a substantial story of the people who worked in service, both for Dickens and in his imagination.
The Charles Dickens Museum created a series of five videos celebrating the exhibition, to celebrate the way Dickens wrote about food. Pen Vogler, Food historian, shares history and recipes from the time, including punch, Christmas Pudding, gingerbread and Victorian cheese toasties.
Louisa said: “The exhibition was an immersive experience – weaving through the historic rooms as well as our temporary exhibition spaces with a family trail throughout. The exhibition and accompanying public and education programmes acted as test beds for interactive elements in the Museum: audio files, smell jars, activity stations, handling objects, large font and braille text, and audio description”.
The project also left a legacy within the museum itself, through teaching staff new ways of creating family friendly exhibitions, gaining a body of new, researched content for schools and families, and also allowing them to provide a bespoke touch tour for a group of blind and partially sighted schoolchildren for the first time.
“We’ve learnt that quite small changes in museum interpretation will allow us to make a more family friendly experience. We’ve realised how much scope there already is in our museum for interactive content, for example, we can make more of the historic kitchen, which is full of sensory experiences and handle-able objects already. The touch tour taught us a lot about what we can do to make the museum more welcoming to blind and partially sighted visitors. It also informed our new education tours, which have woven in multi-sensory elements such as smell jars, sounds and tactile objects”.
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“Just go for it! The Project Grant gave us the opportunity to be more ambitious about what we could achieve in our exhibition programme. Special exhibitions are by their nature temporal but with this grant we have been able to ensure a significant legacy from Food Glorious Food, with new approaches to interpretation and lasting resources for our Education and Public Programmes”.
