Students use Dickens artefacts

Students from The University of Buckingham are the first ever to examine hundreds of thousands of unseen artefacts, some of which may have belonged to Charles Dickens.

They are students on the The Department of English and Digital Media’s new MA in Dickens Studies by Research, and as part of their studies they are working with archive materials at the Charles Dickens Museum in London, which estimates it holds between 100,000 and 500,000 items in its unrivalled collection of material relating to the novelist and his work.

Among the items which students have so far examined are a scrapbook of Charles Dickens’s obituaries, a deck of cards featuring Dickensian characters, believed to be used for one of the early versions of the card game Snap, and a cryptic letter from Dickens to the artist George Cruikshank, discussing the details for one of the illustrations to Oliver Twist.

The suspected half a million items held by the museum will be available for scrutiny by students at 48 Doughty Street, Central London, in the Camden house where Charles Dickens wrote The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby.

An example of the type of artefact the students will be researching is a turquoise and gold engagement ring given by Dickens to his wife-to-be Catherine in 1836, which may be the one in David Copperfield that was given to Dora and described as “A pretty little toy, with its blue stones”.

University of Buckingham Professor of English, John Drew, who co-runs the programme with Dr Pete Orford, said: “There was a genuine excitement in the room as we watched the students handle these rare materials, and speculate about where they came from. We have nine further guest seminars with Dickens experts, several of them based at the Museum. Students will also be working in the Museum’s archive room, by arrangement with the curatorial team.”

Valerie Jayne, a student on the new programme said: “My favourite item was an original June 1866 copy of All the Year Round. I loved it because I had never seen a Victorian periodical before and I enjoyed the look and feel of the pages and the text. The best bit was reading a huge advert for insurance for people who are injured in railway accidents…exactly a year after Dickens was injured in the Staplehurst railway accident! We also found a tiny advert publicising a Dickens reading in a couple of weeks. That was very exciting too.”

Students will be working towards the submission of a substantial research thesis based on their work, whether at the Museum, or in London’s other research libraries, or based on the University’s own online archive of Dickens’s journalism, Dickens Journals Online (www.djo.org.uk).