A DICKENS MUSEUM

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19503, 11 June 1925, Page 10

A DICKENS MUSEUM

No. 48 DOUGHTY STREET. DEFINITE LINK WITH NOVELIST. Press Association —By Telegraph—Copyright. LONDON, Jtma 8. (Received June 10, at 5.5 p.m.) To mark the fifty-fifth anniversary of the death of Charles Dickens, members of the Dickens Fellowship laid a wreath on his grave in Westminster Abbey. Lord Birkenhead opened No. 48 Doughty street as a Dickens Museum. Here Dickens wrote “Oliver Twist” and “Nicholas Nickleby.” The basement has been converted into the similitude of the farm kitchen at Dingley Hall. The cost was bora by a rich American. On February 7 last, the anniversary of Dickens’s birthday, an appeal wag made to all lovers of his works to join in providing ah endowment fund which would enable No. 48 Doughty street to be dedicated as a library, picture gallery, museum and meeting place for all admirers of Dickens who live in or visit London from other parts of the world. The project was made immediately practicable through the fact that the freehold of the house had already been secured by the Dickens Fellowship which organised the appeal _ for funds. The Dickens collection, which Mr B. \V. Matz, editor of the Dickensian, has handed over to the Dickens House in Doughty street, is considered the most valuabfc in existence from the student’s point of view. It includes such interesting mementoes as Dickens’s reading table which he used for all his public readings in England and in the United States, the bust of the novelist, modelled from a mask taken after his death, and one of the balusters from the Old White Hart in the Boro’ where Mr Pickwick first met Sam Weller. From Doughty street Dickens used to take long rides on horseback, inviting his friend and biographer, Foster, to. join him for “a fifteen mile ride out, ■ditto in, and a lunch on the road,” and there he celebrated the first anniversary of his marriage. I