It was the best of times...

Our busy Saturday in London included a visit to the Charles Dickens House.  Well, it included it for me.  Bill went to the Costa Coffee around the corner for a cigar and a cuppa at the outside tables.

 Dickens lived in this house on Doughty Street for only 2 years but wrote Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby here.  Pretty good for two years effort, huh?  Maybe years from now our Eton cottage will be a museum and they will say "Jen and Bill lived here for 2 years and wrote 700 blog posts. 698 of them complete rubbish."

The rooms were generally smaller than I expected but then again, this was early in his career and his first children were being born so I guess he would have moved up from here.  While it was interesting to imagine him writing at his desk or having a dinner party in the blue dining room, the room that really entertained was the last on the tour.

 Photographs of objects from Dicken's world were hung around the room.  Visitors were invited to write little notes on tags as if they were Charles' neighbor asking for the return of these borrowed objects.  There were multiple notes for each object and I was amazed at the time and effort people put into some of these (see below).  I didn't see any tags or pens out in the room to write my own and Bill was probably about to light cigar #2 so I didn't take the time to add one to the collection.  It's probably just as well since I would have wanted to use the word 'poo'.  What was the Victorian word for poo?  As a side note I've noticed that the BBC has no problem with the word "shat" as in "I shat myself".  This has been said in two different prime time shows recently (not Downton Abbey although I would dearly love to hear the Dowager Countess announce that she shat herself.)  Ok, I've gone way off track here.  See why I didn't write a tag for the museum???