Exhibition at Charles Dickens Museum in London looks at writer\u2019s holiday pursuits, from Kent to the Isle of Wight<\/p>\n
It\u2019s summer in the city, the pubs are crowded, and the coast beckons. In a year that has so far brought five significant heatwaves, it is a fair description of the current holiday season.<\/p>\n
But the same was true, too, of the much less frequent hot, dry summers of the past, including 186 years ago when Charles Dickens put pen to paper in anticipation of escaping London for the sea breeze in Broadstairs, Kent.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is no news in London \u2013 everybody is hurrying out of town \u2013 the two great theatres are shut up \u2013 and all the watering places are crammed with hot people,\u201d he writes to his brother Alfred on 12 August 1840.<\/p>\n
His letter, which is to go on public display for the first time, is one of several items of correspondence shedding light on Dickens and his holiday pursuits, from picnics on the Thames, beach showering on the Isle of Wight, and being ravaged by mosquitoes, bugs and other insects<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile Dickens rarely slowed down, he made sure to find time for holidays and days off, packing up plenty of his belongings and heading to the Kent coast or the West Country with his family,\u201d said Emma Harper, deputy director at London\u2019s Charles Dickens Museum, where the letters will go on display in the study where he wrote Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and The Pickwick Papers.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile Dickens loved London, he was very happy to escape its crowded hot pubs for the cooler climes of the coast, or if he decided to break his routine by taking a spur of the moment day off, he would consider this a holiday. He would take his work on holiday with him and sometimes even brought his favourite pieces of furniture along so he could write from the chair and desk that suited him best.\u201d<\/p>\n
He positively gloated about his successful mission to construct an outdoor shower cubicle near his \u201cvery pretty\u201d holiday cottage in Bonchurch on the Isle of Wight in 1849, expressing no qualms about spoiling the view for others. He writes to the printer William Bradbury: \u201cWe have made all visitors in search of the picturesque, mad, by putting up an immense wooden caravan on the beach, to shut in a noble waterfall and convert it into a shower bath! With some five hundred feet of fall. Which we take, every morning, to the unbounded astonishment of the aboriginal inhabitants.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of an 1851 trip on the Thames with his son Charley \u201cand three other young Eton Shavers\u201d, he promises that if his friend Thomas Beard joins them, he will be \u201carmed with a hamper from Fortnum & Mason\u2019s\u201d. They can dine on a bank, \u201cand if you can come, you and I will console ourselves for our antiquity, after dinner, with a trifle of tobacco and champagne\u201d.<\/p>\n
Dickens \u201crelaxed energetically\u201d, said Harper, and he loved to travel. To his biographer John Forster he writes of a 1842 trip to Italy: \u201cI see myself in a striped shirt, moustache, blouse, red sash, straw hat, and white trousers, sitting astride a mule, and not caring for the clock, the day of the month, or the day of the week.\u201d<\/p>\n
Reflecting on one long excursion, he tells Beard in 1845 of \u201cthe gentlemanly vagabond I have been, for the last six or eight months \u2013 the extraordinary beds I have slept in \u2013 and the bewildering amount of fleas, mosquitoes, bugs, and other insects I have unwillingly bepastured \u2013 these things have hardly left me any leisure in my holiday, until within the last four or five weeks. During the whole of which time I have been employed, chiefly, in lying on my back on sofas, and leaning out of windows and over balconies, in a sort of mild intoxication.\u201d<\/p>\n
Summer in the City with Charles Dickens runs from 26 August to 27 September at the Charles Dickens Museum in London<\/p>\n