Charles Dickens's Summer Holiday Letters Go On Show

The Charles Dickens Museum today reveals the author's views on summer in the city, his favourite holidays and ingenious efforts to cool off during a hot British summer. 

Running through September 27, a new display in the study at Dickens’s London home at 48 Doughty Street, now the Charles Dickens Museum, includes a letter written to his son Alfred on August 12, 1840, on display for the first time, in which after mentioning a forthcoming Broadstairs holiday Dickens gives a familiar assessment of summer in London:

There is no news in London — everybody is hurrying out of town — the two great theatres are shut up — and all the watering places are crammed with hot people.

Other highlights in the letters include Dickens’s glee at his successful mission to construct an outdoor shower cubicle on the Isle of Wight by building around a waterfall in Bonchurch: 

We have taken a very pretty cottage here until the end of September. Leech [Dickens’s illustrator John Leech] and his wife live close by. A friend of mine is the Lord of the Manor, and we 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.

Writing to his friend Thomas Beard from Broadstairs, on August 4, 1842, Dickens is clearly having a lovely time:

This place is most beautiful just now: the weather being past all descriptive powers. Heavens, how crisp the water is- I bathed yesterday. Ballard too has got me some Port Wine which is quite remarkable- for a place like this, really astonishing.

Dickens was keen to coax friends to join hm on holiday. In another letter to Thomas Beard, on June 21, 1849, he implores his friend: 

On the 1st. of August we shall disappear, and if you dont come and Stop a long time and keep on coming and stopping a long time until the end of September, you'll find yourself in the wrong box, ever after. I have not decided on the place yet, but it will be down a railroad and where there is good sea bathing. You may rely upon that, my buck.

Two years later, he makes another attempt to drag Beard away, for a day on the Thames:

I write to you from Macready’s where we have been staying a few days, to enquire if you can make next Tuesday the 1st. July a holiday? For this reason. I have promised Charley [Dickens’s son] that I will appear at 11 that morning at Slough, armed with a hamper from Fortnum and Mason’s, and take him and three other young Etonian Shavers up the river. He “knows a bank” where we can dine; and if you can come, you and I will console ourselves for our antiquity, after dinner, with a trifle of tobacco and champagne in the starn of the wessel.

“While Charles 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," said Emma Harper, Deputy Director of the Charles Dickens Museum. "While 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. Dickens relaxed energetically.”