Time travelling through a city's Victorian past in Dickens and London at the Museum of London

Exhibition: Dickens and London, Museum of London, London, December 9 2011 – June 10 2012

"Dickens," says the curator of this exhibition, Alex Werner, "fits well with a Christmas opening." Given that one of Dickens's most famous works is A Christmas Carol, he's right.

However, those familiar with Dickens's work will know that his world was not full of the jollity and happy families we like to associate with Christmas, and visitors should not expect a cheery exhibition.

What they can expect is a powerful, comprehensive guide to Victorian London and Dickens's relationship with it.

The entrance display tells us that Dickens called the city his "magic lantern" – a plethora of images and experiences that projected into his extraordinary imagination and helped him become, in the words of journalist Walter Bagehot, London’s "special correspondent for posterity".

The exhibition space is large, and there are too many individual objects to do justice in this review to the collection that the museum has managed to amass.

Werner says the curators chose exhibits which had the closest links with Dickens; everything here has a clear link, but one suspects the available material could comfortably fill a space at least twice the size.

There are exhibits worth mentioning specifically, because they're almost worth the entry price on their own.

Dickens's writing desk forms part of an audio-visual display that's complemented by Robert W Buss's unfinished painting Dickens’s Dream – the painting portrays Dickens asleep in a chair surrounded by characters from his novels.

Original manuscripts on display include Bleak House, David Copperfield and Great Expectations; one rather lovely design feature is the use of huge letters that hang above the manuscripts.

You can make out some words. Werner says the idea was to "make it seem like the words are forming; the pen is about to hit the paper of the manuscripts".

Divided into "chapters", Dickens and London covers Dickens's home life and childhood, Victorian domestic life, the theatre, industrialisation, criminal justice and death.

Each section allows visitors to immerse themselves in a multimedia display which gives an insight into the lives of the ordinary people who populate Dickens’s stories.

The often seedy and grim realities of life are exemplified by evocative quotes on the walls demonstrating Dickens’s remarkable powers of observation. 

Dickens never shied away from expressing his political opinions or bringing his own life into his work. His traumatic experience of working in a blacking factory after his father went to a debtors' prison comes through strongly in the characters of Pip in Great Expectations and Oliver Twist.

His abhorrence of convict ships was eloquently articulated through Magwitch in Great Expectations, and the tragic deaths that pepper his stories reflect his own experiences.
 
One of the many things the exhibition does beautifully is relate Dickens's London to London today. Two hundred years after his birth, London remains a city of extremes and the social ills he writes about still exist.

This is highlighted in a film by William Raban, who spent five months following Dickens's insomniac footsteps through night-time London, filming places and people.

The film (19 minutes long but well worth the time) plays to a soundtrack of Dickens's 1860 essay Night Walks, parts of which will ring unsettlingly true with visitors who know London well.

Enjoyment of this exhibition isn't dependent on whether you know London or not, though; a passing interest in Dickens and Victorian London is sufficient.

Before entering the exhibition, this reviewer will admit to only having that passing interest. Halfway round, though, it felt like I was experiencing a literary time-traveller's ideal guided tour, with Dickens as the ideal guide.

• Open 10am-6pm (closed December 24-26). Admission £5-£8, family tickets available.

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