A Kiwi is behind a new exhibition in London displaying never before seen items including an original handwritten manuscript from one of Charles Dicken’s classics, Oliver Twist.
The item is part of ‘More! Oliver Twist, Dickens and Stories of the City’, which celebrates Oliver Twist, one of the supreme storyteller’s greatest tales, in the place it was created.
Louisa Price, formerly from Auckland, has been curator at the Charles Dickens Museum since 2014. The museum occupies a typical Georgian terraced five level house in the borough of Camden, which was in fact Charles and Catherine Dickens’s home from 25 March 1837 to 1839.
“It was here he wrote Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby and entertained high-profile friends, making connections around the city,” Price told 1 NEWS.
Also on display for the first time, a doctor’s note on the author’s health after he introduced one of English literature’s most brutal deaths. Dickens’s doctor reveals concerns that the fictional murder of Nancy by Sykes was so distressing it could have placed the author’s life in danger.
“The murder of Nancy by Bill Sykes is among the most horribly memorable events in all of Dickens writing,” Price said.
“It is fascinating to be able to show the visceral power of the scene and how wary Dickens was of inflicting it on his audience.”
“And we can now see the clinical evidence of the toll his own work took on him.”
Visitors will be able to see illustrations of Fagin and the previously unseen lockets exchanged by Dickens and his sister-in-law, who died in the house having taken ill and inspired one of the characters.
“Doughty Street in 1837 was a respectable middle class homes really on the edge of the city, Dickens would only walk ten minutes down the road and hit a slum called St Giles, which was a really notorious area of crime,” Price said.
“Walk ten minutes in the opposite direction you would hit another slum called Saffron Hill, which pop up in his novel Oliver Twist.”
Saffron Hill was where Artful Dodger leads Oliver to Fagin’s den in Dicken’s novel. Written at a time of great personal turbulence for Dicken, Oliver Twist is both a comic adventure and a savage critique of British Institutions, combining poverty, petty crime, brutal murder, romance, friendship and heroism.
Before moving to London, Price spent her early years working for the Auckland Museum in the social history department with an incredible team she “misses dearly”.
“I’ll tell you what there’s a lot of New Zealand even in a museum like the Charles Dickens Museum.”
“I’ve got letters from Dickens being amazed to hear that there is a Pickwick Club in 1870 setup in New Zealand.”
Charles Dickens penned beloved classics such as A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield and Great Expectations and is regarded as one of the giants of English literature to this day.
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