Charles Dickens Museum
Dickens’s only surviving London home (48 Doughty Street) is intimate, readable and packed with originals. He wrote ‘Oliver Twist’ and ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ here; the rooms—kitchen to nursery—still feel lived-in. Expect manuscripts, first editions, stage posters and wonderfully odd personal objects. It’s a 60–90 minute visit that connects the novels to real floors, food smells and family logistics.
Opening Hours
What's not to miss inside?
Study & Writing Desk
Where the breakthrough books formedDesk, chair and quills anchor the leap from journalist to household-name novelist.
📍 First floor front room
Dining Room
Performance before the stageDickens hosted readings and lively dinners here—rehearsing voices that later filled public halls.
📍 Ground floor
Kitchen & Below Stairs
Fuel behind the fictionCoal, copper pans and service bells show the domestic machine that kept a 1830s household running.
📍 Basement
Nursery & Family Rooms
Work and nine children under one roofCradles, toys and letters fill out the home life behind the deadlines.
📍 Upper floors
Inspire your Friends
- Dickens kept a letter-opener topped with the taxidermied paw of his beloved cat ‘Bob’—a macabre, tender Victorian keepsake on display.
- He wrote parts of ‘Oliver Twist’ and ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ in this house while still filing journalism—serialisation rhythms shaped his plotting cliffhangers.
- Dickens’s famed public readings began as parlour performances; the breath-control drills and vocal markings survive on his prompt copies.
- The museum acquired Dickens’s writing desk and chair after a public appeal—objects that travelled back from later homes to reunite with this address.
