The working life of 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.