Folks who attended the Dickens Universe just before the pandemic will remember a guest speaker from the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A), who came to teach attendees how to help in a project he was managing at the time, “Deciphering Dickens.” Douglas Dodds was working with Dickens’s original manuscripts, held by the V&A, comparing them to the published editions of Dickens’s work. He told me last October, when I went to visit the project in London, that two groups advanced the project most rapidly: one at the Pierpont Morgan Library in Manhattan, and the other at the Dickens Universe at UC Santa Cruz. Everyone who took part in Dodds’s workshops should give yourself a pat on the back!
His findings from this work will be published later this year in an article titled “Deciphering Dickens,” by Dodds & Emma Curry, in Digital Dickens, edited by Emily Bell, Peter Orford and Claire Wood. (York: White Rose University Press, 2025). According to the publisher, “Digital Dickens is the first book-length, state-of-the-field discussion of Dickens in digital humanities, combining contributions from leading practitioners with emerging voices in the field, to construct both a clear and accessible survey for students and researchers, and also to offer a roadmap for future digital Dickens projects.” There is also a page on the V&A website devoted to the project.
When I got to the museum, I was hoping to view the “Deciphering” project in full swing. Instead, I learned that because of the pandemic, staff positions and hours at the V&A had been cut, and Dodds has gone into semi-retirement. (He’s living a very full life: a copy of his recent book, V&A Pattern: Digital Pioneers, is on display in the V&A Gift Shop.) He was very generous to come to the museum to show me not the “Deciphering” project, but anything and everything related to Dickens.
Perhaps you can find the time to get to London. I promise you, it will be most fulfilling from a Dickensian point of view, and of course the museum itself is a treasure-trove and the favorite museum of many of my friends. A service on the V&M website offers a way to see which Dickens items are currently on display. It also has an “order an object” feature, which allows those who plan to visit the museum to ask for items that are not on display to be available for perusal when they make an appointment to visit.
We started with a display about James Kay-Shuttleworth, a physician who became the first secretary of the Committee of the Privy Council on Education in 1839. Dodds believes strongly that this is the real person behind the character of Hard Times’ Thomas Gradgrind, who scolds the children for admiring fabrics and wallpapers that depict anything representational: i.e., horses on wallpaper or flowers on carpets.
We then went into a small room—I will call it an alcove—that contains many personal items of Dickens: among them a portrait, a “desk slope,” or what I would call a portable writing surface, and a wooden cylinder to hold his pens and writing accessories. Dodds explained that it was Dickens’s friend John Forster who donated these items to the museum. Forster lived near the Victoria & Albert Museum; he and Dickens frequented the museum as young men, and on his deathbed Forster gave all his Dickens memorabilia to the V&A, stipulating that all be kept by his wife until her death.
We then went into a large portrait gallery, which holds several paintings related to Dickens’s work. There is a Daniel Maclise portrait of John Forster in Ben Jonson’s play Every Man in His Humour, in which both he and Dickens performed. One can also find popular characters from Dickens novels, such as Dolly Varden (in a seductive pose) from Barnaby Rudge, and Florence Dombey (much more sedate) from Dombey and Son.
Most Dickens fans will visit the Charles Dickens Museum, located in another part of town. It was the first home of Charles Dickens and his new bride. It is still intact, with furnishings and intimate, personal items, including caricatures of Dickens and Forster. A visit to the small Dickens collection at the V&A, however, will add a certain dimension: perhaps most appealing, a visit to the café, including the Morris, Gamble, and Poynter Rooms, which are exquisite.
