Charles Dickens Museum

Listen to the street for a moment. Doughty Street is quiet for central London. Traffic is a low hum somewhere beyond the rooftops, and your footsteps sound clearly on the pavement. The terrace in front of you is flat-fronted brick, row after row of tall sash windows and black-painted railings. Number 48 looks like its neighbours. That plainness is the first surprise, because the house behind this door saw one of the fastest rises to fame in English literature.

This is the Charles Dickens Museum, in the Bloomsbury district of London. Dickens moved here in 1837 with his young wife, Catherine, and their first baby. He was only in his mid-twenties. He was not yet a famous novelist. He was a young journalist whose comic serial, The Pickwick Papers, was starting to sell in huge numbers. He paid rent on this house as a tenant, and he stayed here for less than three years.

Those years were extraordinarily productive. In these rooms Dickens finished The Pickwick Papers. He wrote Oliver Twist here, the story of a workhouse orphan who asks for more. He also wrote Nicholas Nickleby here, with its attack on cruel boarding schools. He often worked on several serials at once, and wrote to monthly deadlines. When he arrived at Doughty Street he was a promising writer. When he left at the end of 1839, he was the most popular author in Britain.

Stand back and look at the terrace as a whole. These are Georgian houses, from the period when four kings named George ruled Britain, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The style is simple and even. It has brick fronts, regular windows, and a fanlight above the door, which is a half-moon window that lets light into the hallway. In Dickens's time, this was a respectable middle-class street. Local histories say it was once private, with gates at each end.

There is another surprise in the building itself. Of all the homes Dickens rented in London, this is the only one that still stands. The others have gone, lost to redevelopment over the decades. This house nearly disappeared too. In the early twentieth century it faced demolition. A group of admirers called the Dickens Fellowship stepped in and bought the house. They opened it as a museum in 1925, and it has welcomed readers ever since.

Inside, the rooms are arranged as a family home of the 1830s. Visitors move up the narrow staircase from floor to floor, much as the household once did. The dining room is on the ground floor. Here Dickens entertained friends, actors and fellow writers. He loved company, games and theatre, and he enjoyed being a host. Look at the table settings and imagine a long evening of food, wine and conversation, with the young author at the centre of it.

Upstairs is the study, the room that matters most to many visitors. This is where Dickens worked, often for long hours at a time. Among the objects in the collection is a writing desk that he used in later life, at his country home in Kent. He sat at that desk for some of his later novels. It is a plain piece of furniture. But it is hard to look at it and not think of all the characters who first took shape on its surface.

Not every memory in this house is a happy one. Catherine's younger sister, Mary Hogarth, lived here with the family. She was seventeen, and Dickens adored her. In May 1837, only weeks after the move, she fell suddenly ill after an evening at the theatre. She died here the next day, in Dickens's arms. He was devastated. He wore her ring for the rest of his life. Many readers believe her memory shaped the gentle young heroines in his later books.

The house was also full of new life. Two of Dickens's daughters were born here during the family's stay. The upper floors hold bedrooms and a nursery, and they give you a sense of how crowded and busy the home must have been. Babies, servants, visitors, and a husband writing furiously against a deadline all shared this one tall, narrow house. It was a working home, not a grand mansion.

Now go down to the basement. This is where the servants worked, out of sight of the family and their guests. You can see the kitchen, with its range and heavy pans, and a cool room for washing up and storage. This floor matters for understanding Dickens. His novels are full of cooks, clerks, maids and people struggling to get by. He knew poverty himself. As a boy, he was sent to work in a factory while his father was in a debtors' prison.

The museum is more than furniture. Its collection includes letters, manuscripts, portraits, early editions of the novels, and personal objects from Dickens's life. Some of the rooms change their displays over time, and exhibitions explore different sides of his world. The building next door has been joined to the museum, which gives space for visitor facilities and extra displays. A major restoration took place around 2012, the two hundredth anniversary of Dickens's birth in 1812.

After your visit, spend a few minutes walking around the neighbourhood. Bloomsbury became famous in the twentieth century for writers and thinkers, but Dickens was here first. His London was a city of fog, coal smoke, horses and crowded courts. Much of that has gone. Yet the line of brick houses, the railings, and the small squares nearby still give you a feeling for the city he walked through every day, often for miles at night.

Before you leave, look up once more at the windows of number 48. Somewhere behind that glass, a young man sat with ink, paper and a deadline. He was writing stories that people still read, act and argue about today. Then turn and walk down the street, slowly. Notice the faces at the bus stop, the shop signs, the people hurrying past. Dickens would have noticed them too... and he might have found a story in each one.