Dinner with the Dickenses: God Bless Us Every One

"Please, sir, I want some more," said Oliver Twist, in that most famous of lines by Charles Dickens. The workhouse boy was desperate for enough gruel, but Dickens' work as a whole overflows with references to food and drink. And, as Food Glorious Food, the latest exhibition at the Charles Dickens Museum in London shows, it played just as central a role in the Victorian writer's own life.

The museum occupies the house at 48 Doughty Street that Dickens and his family moved into in 1837 and where he wrote Oliver Twist and The Pickwick Papers. It's the dining room that's the first you step into on your tour, with the table set for entertaining on a lavish, but not too lavish, scale. Dickens wasn't comfortable with grand dinner parties, depicting them, as in Dombey and Son, as frosty occasions where the bad behaviour of the servants reflected the flaws of their employers.

The Victorian middle classes didn't do their own cooking, of course; they had servants in the kitchen, down in the basement in Doughty Street. Those catering for the Dickens family had plenty of the latest utensils and gadgets. That's a state-of-the-art roaster there on the right in the picture below. But there was also apparently one old-fashioned, tried and trusted housewife's friend: A hedgehog (as seen in front of the stove) would have kept the kitchen clean of creepy-crawlies.

The poor weren't so well provided for. In A Christmas Carol, Mrs Cratchit didn't have an oven to roast her own goose for Christmas dinner and had to send it out to the baker's. Still, there never was such a goose, followed by a pudding, like a speckled cannon-ball, which would have been cooked, as you can see elsewhere in the basement, in the washtub. "God bless us every one," said Tiny Tim, after the Cratchits had partaken of the feast.

Dickens was able to write about food from the point of view of every class. He'd known hunger as a boy when his father was imprisoned by debt, something he kept a very close secret during his lifetime, though passages in David Copperfield on the topic of food appear to reflect his experience.

Dickens' 1839 accounts book shows that, unusually, he paid the servants' wages, rather than his wife Catherine, and his involvement in domestic affairs intrigued society. In a letter on display, Dickens details a conversation he had with the butcher about a breast of venison. 

You'll learn that you had to be careful about food in an era when adulteration was common. "Wery good thing is weal pie," opined Sam Weller in The Pickwick Papers, "when you know the lady as made it, and is quite sure it ain't kittens."

If Catherine found her household duties being usurped by her husband (who surely had plenty of fiction he ought to be getting on with), she was able to muscle in on his territory, too. In 1851, she published What Shall We Have for Dinner?, a book of menus and recipes. 

Wife of superstar celebrity author publishes cookbook? How very modern.

There's lots more, including the opportunity to discover some strange Victorian food combinations, why Dickens ate turtle in the office rather than at home, and what the writer liked to wear to dinner, in this fun exhibition. Well worth visiting for anyone with an interest in history or literature.  

Practicalities

Food Glorious Food: Dinner with Dickens continues at the Charles Dickens Museum at 48 Doughty Street in London until April 22. It's open daily except Monday from 1000 to 1700, and full-price admission is £9.50. Chancery Lane on the Central Line and Russell Square on the Piccadilly Line are the nearest Underground stations.

Images

Dining room at 48 Doughty Street. Photo: Art Exhibitions Blog
Kitchen at 48 Doughty Street. Photo: Lewis Bush (c) Charles Dickens Museum
Portrait of Charles Dickens, Charles Dickens Museum collection
Engraving of Catherine Dickens after portrait by Daniel Maclise, 1846, Charles Dickens Museum collection
What Shall We Have for Dinner? by Catherine Dickens, 1852 edition, Charles Dickens Museum collection