The working life of Museum of London

Vauxhall, 1785 by Thomas Rowlandson

Pleasure gardens competed for visitors, vying with each other to offer evermore exciting entertainments. Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens offered a wide variety of entertainment, including lion-tamers, trampoline clowns, fortune tellers, ventriloquists, monkeys, dogs, jugglers, horses who danced to a waltz and fire walkers.

Tournaire's Equestrians, Vauxhall Gardens, 1846

Costumes from the Museum of London’s pleasure gardens

The Museum of London’s pleasure gardens

Have the recent TV and radio adaptations alongside celebrations for the upcoming 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens seen you revisit or read for the first time a work by this creative genius?

If so there is still time to join our Dickens Book Club and share your thoughts on the work of this great author via Facebook and Twitter.

We will be focusing on Bleak House in February, sharing favourite passages and our thoughts as we progress through this work.

We will also be completing our reading of Barnaby Rudge from January, so do look out for updates here as the novel approaches the Gordon Riots of 1780.

When the book club was launched in September 2011  we decided to ask our social media followers which work of Dickens to read to close our book club in May 2012.

Having reviewed the suggestions and comments received. The title that we have chosen to feature in May is David Copperfield. With its “memorable characters written in the first person” this was agreed to be a worthy title to close our book club celebrations of Charles Dickens work.

Alongside this online book club we have also been running a series of book club events at Foyles Bookshop flagship store at Charing Cross, London. The next meeting is being held at 6.30pm on Monday 6 February 2012 focusing on Bleak House with our Dickens and London exhibition curator Alex Werner.

 There is no need to book just turn up on the night and meet in person other fans and aficionados of Dickens.

Our books clubs are ran in support of our Dickens and London exhibition at the Museum of London which is open until 10 June 2012.

Having in previous months featured such titles as The Mystery of Edwin Drood and A Tale of Two Cities on our virtual book club in support of our new exhibition, Dickens and London. We are focusing this month on one of Dickens less renowned works – Barnaby Rudge.

It is early days in terms of my reading (and the sharing of my thoughts which can be found on our twitter and Facebook pages) but I have already been struck by how this work may have influenced a later addition to the Dickens canon, Great Expectations.

I have also had a look for Barnaby Rudge related content from our exhibition, and have found this from 1840 that details the execution of one Francois Benjamin Courvoisier:

(c) Museum of London

From its supporting caption I noted mention that Dickens witnessed three public executions in his lifetime including that of the Swiss valet Francois Benjamin Courvoisier convicted of murdering his master Lord Russell.

Dickens was horrified by the effect of the public spectacle on the crowd. Amongst the crowd gathered outside Newgate for the execution he noted there was ‘nothing but ribaldry, debauchery,levity, drunkenness and flaunting vice in fifty other shapes’. Such scenes were recreated in the novel Barnaby Rudge that he began the following year.

I plan to blog again once I have completed sharing my thoughts on the novel but until then it would be great to hear if you plan to read along with me!

Dickens and London is open until 10 June 2012.

It’s official, we are now starting to feel rather festive as our Christmas trees are in place and decorated at both the Museum of London and the Museum of London Docklands.

Above is the tree for the Museum of London which is displayed in our foyer near to the entrance to the first of our galleries, London Before London.

Here is a look at the tree in place in the foyer of the Museum of London Docklands…

With Victorian Grotto’s created especially for Santa (although we hear that after Christmas a certain Scrooge will be in residence) due to open at both museums on Saturday and lots of festive fun for families planned throughout December we hope that a visit to either (or both) of our museums will add some Christmas cheer!

Now that our reading of The Mystery of Edwin Drood has come to an end Records Manager, Sarah Demb, shares her final thoughts and experiences on completing this unfinished work.

In truth, I find Dickens a difficult read, although I’m a voracious reader of maximalist fiction and devoted to fictional London, which informs my immigrant experience of the city almost as much as my daily life. But I had to force myself through this short novel (I highly recommend Dan Simmons’ ‘Drood’- his fictionalisation vision of events that could have inspired the writing of the book as Dickens and his friend, author Wilkie Collins, confound each other in nightly escapades and attempt to identify the mysterious Drood, who us far more menacing than the innocent victim in Dickens’ story).

Reader, I was only truly interested in two characters, those whose relationship seemed to have tension and spark, namely Edwin and Rosa, betrothed at the behest and bequests of their respective deceased fathers.

I wanted so much to like the entire book, but only Rosa’s character really drew me in, with her passionate energy and desire to be honest in her emotional dealings.

Did Dickens do this on purpose? Discuss…

True to his serialist origins, the central mystery of Edwin’s disappearance (although to me the real mystery is what Jasper is up to and why his opium supplier shows up in Cloisterham) doesn’t occur until over half way through the book, which I think might drag even if it wasn’t unfinished, although the undercurrent of menace that Jasper exudes kept me hanging on.

As we know, Dickens died before completing the book, so perhaps it all would have made more sense had he finished the novel.

You can read Sarah’s blog post as she began her reading of The Mystery of Edwin Drood here.

Dickens and London, a new exhibition from the Museum of London opens 9 December.

Our Primary Schools Programme Manager Nina Sprigge, reveals more about the build up to Kids Takeover Day 2011 at the Museum of London.

Preparations for November’s Dickens Book Club novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood with our Records Manager, Sarah Demb are now in place:

I love a good mystery but balked at the normal bulk of a Dickens’ tome, so surely The Mystery of Edwin Drood was for me.

It opens as a classic potboiler in its lurid depiction of an opium den in Victorian London’s East End.

Fascinating to both his readers of the time and countless others afterwards, he invites us to spy through Drood’s uncle John Jasper’s eyes, safe in the knowledge that this exotic depravity can’t touch us. But Jasper next fetches up in placid rural Cloisterham…

The opening chapter of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, classic in the Orientalism of the time, immediately made me uncomfortable.

The racist depiction of anonymous (and in real life almost certainly blameless) Chinese sits uncomfortably with our contemporary sensibilities and our acknowledgement of the rich cultural history of this city.

If this is Dicken’s London, then I prefer the stifled, cosy twin ‘cloister’ of Furvinall’s Inn, which puts us squarely in the precints of Holborn, in environs we can almost recreate during late night walks today.

The Inns of London provide some of the most magical, evocative landscapes, windows into the recent past, although Dickens may not have meant his readers to romanticise them.

I will be continuing my thoughts as we progress through the book via regular book club posts on Twitter and Facebook  (why not join us?) and will round up my final thoughts back here on the blog once we have completed our journey through the mystery of Edwin Drood.

Dickens and London, a major new exhibition at the Museum of London, opens 9 December 2011.

Planning to visit the Museum of London this half term with you family?

To support the launch of HiddenCity’s (external link) interactive text message trail we are looking for a family who would be happy to be filmed using the trail in our galleries early next week.

The film would then be posted onto the Museum of London’s YouTube Channel (external link) and mentioned in tweets (external link) and Facebook updates (external link).

As a thank you for taking part we will provide you with £50 of museum shop vouchers to spend during your visit or save until Christmas.

If you are interested in helping the museum launch this exciting new product email marketing@museumoflondon.org.uk with your contact details including your intended visit date and time and we will see if your timings match ours!

The Discovery Trail takes families on a journey of exploration through London’s turbulent history. Using text messages and a map of the museum, players are guided through a trail of clues, each leading them to a new location within the Museum where they use their ingenuity to deduce answers from their surroundings. Players who successfully complete the trail win a coveted ‘Certified Londoner’ badge by showing the Museum hosts their final congratulatory text message.

To take part, participants sign up in advance by visiting the HiddenCity website (external link), head to the Museum, send the message ‘start’ and get cracking. The trail takes approximately two hours to complete, including a break. It is ideally played by several teams, each consisting of two to four people and costs £16 per team. Entry to the Museum of London is free.

Those who take up the challenge will step through time and can expect to see, touch, hear and even smell exhibits spanning prehistoric, Roman and medieval London, right up to the 20th century and present day city.

Documentary filmmaker William Raban set out in March 2011 to make a film showing London at night as it is now and to contrast this with the lucid observations made by Dickens 150 years ago.

This film will form a key component of the Museum of London’s Dickens and London exhibition  which opens on 9 December 2011.

London and its night-time people form the characters of Charles Dickens’ essay Night Walks.

Here, William shares his thoughts on the creative process:

“Not being a creature of the night myself, I was challenged by the task of retracing the great man’s footsteps, setting off after midnight and returning “in the small hours” to observe and capture London haunts and their insomniac communities.

The first task was to become invisible so that I could film without people becoming affronted by the camera. 

I carried the equipment in a large supermarket bag pulling the tripod behind me strapped to a luggage trolley.  I blended with the other houseless people of the night and soon they became my friends. 

Filmed over five months, such are the fortunes of street cinematography that when luck was on my side, I returned with good shots; at other times, I came back with nothing.  

The Houseless Shadow is now nearly finished – taking its name from the following passage from Dickens’ Night Walks: “Drip, drip, drip, from ledge and coping, splash from pipes and water-spouts, and by-and-by the houseless shadow would fall upon the stones that pave the way to Waterloo Bridge.”

A soundtrack by David Cunningham perfectly complements the film in capturing the mood of night-time London in 2011.

I hope that when immersed in the Victorian exhibits, the film will leave visitors with a strong impression that the London of Charles Dickens comes alive in the present day, especially at night walking the city’s streets. 

There are striking differences from the mid Victorian age though some things remain remarkably similar such as when “the potmen thrust the last brawling drunkards onto the street”.  I wonder, what Dickens’ keen eye for injustice, what he would have made of the growing numbers of houseless on the streets of our glittering and conspicuously affluent city?”

A trailer for The Houseless Shadow, a 19 minute film by William Raban, is available to view on our YouTube channel here.

October’s Dickens Book Club has already kicked off in my household, descending as I have into Dickens’ murky world of the year one thousand seven hundred and seventy five in A Tale of Two Cities.

Despite having studied English Literature at university my Dickens readometer is a little stunted (blame the tutors). Great Expectations (favourite all-time novel) and Oliver Twist (precious few show tunes) are the only two books I have made it to the end of. Even my dad’s fervent enthusiasm couldn’t see me to the end of The Pickwick Papers while the sheer length of Bleak House seemed overwhelming to the point of being unreadable.

But I’m ready to start anew. I’m already excited about peering through the thick mist that envelops so many of Dickens’ novels to unearth the maze of characters beneath; to find new favourite phrases from Dickens’ witticisms (the indignant ‘I’ll eat my head!’ a particular favourite from Great Expectations); and to discover the moments that will stay with me long after the book is done, just like those between Pip and Joe – what larks!

At forty six chapters long I am being pragmatic about the challenge that lays before us. My plan is to read two chapters per day for the first fifteen days of October, then one chapter per day until the end of the month. If my maths is correct this should see us glide neatly towards the final chapters in time for Halloween and November’s book, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

So I’ll be captaining our speedy ship through the 400 plus pages of Dickens’ fourteenth novel via updates on Facebook and Twitter – please do share your thoughts, comments, favourite quotes and anything else you’d like to discuss on those pages.

Finally, don’t forget you can buy your copy of A Tale of Two Cities from Foyles Bookshop and receive a discount when using the code ‘MOLBC’.