Published: 26 January, 2012
by GERALD ISAAMAN

They’re calling it “Great Expectations”, of course.

That is the iconic project costing £3million which is set to bring “living life” back to No 48 Doughty Street, just as it was when Charles Dickens spent two flourishing years living in the heart of Holborn.

The transformation has been a long time coming at what is now the Dickens Museum as it prepares to mark 200 years since the birth of the great novelist and social reformer next month.

“In a way it is our birthday present to Dickens in the bicentenary year that we are restoring his house and making it totally secure for the future,” Dr Florian Schweizer, the museum’s 35-year-old director, said. “And it is our birthday present to Camden, to London and to the world.”

The revamp is being paid for with £1m raised by the museum plus a grant of £2m from the Heritage Lottery Fund, which will enable the Grade I-listed museum to link up with the neighbouring Grade-II property, which it owns.

Moreover, the restoration will return the whole of No 48 to the residence it once was when Dickens lived there from 1837 to 1839, describing it as “my house in town”.

While there the amazingly prolific novelist wrote the last six monthly numbers of Pickwick Papers, 22 parts of Oliver Twist, and 19 monthly episodes of Nicholas Nickleby.

Rooms currently used as offices will be returned to their original status as bedrooms, and the attics will return to being the servants’ quarters, all re-decorated with Victorian wallpapers and carpets plus furniture from Dickens’s day.

Plus, most importantly, there will be a lift to all floors of both houses which, for the first time, will give the museum total access for the disabled, and, with strengthened floors and a new roof, it will accommodate up to 60,000 visitors a year, com­pared with the current 30,000.

The transformation is actually in its second phase – the museum was closed for six weeks last year when initial work was carried out.

This included creating a link between the two houses.

But, as with the plot of many a Dickens saga, Great Expectations in particular, there is a dark side to the celebration, because the museum is to close its doors in April for the project to go ahead.

And that has upset biographer Lucinda Dickens Hawksley – great, great, great grand­daughter of Charles, whose anger exploded in a BBC radio interview in which she claimed the museum had misled people by claiming the Heritage Lottery Fund had insisted the work is out this year.

She had discov­ered this was not true, and declared: “I think it is extraordinary and extremely sad that it has come to this.

“His birthday is on February 7 and the museum will be open for that, but what they have neatly not mentioned is that in August the International Dickens Fellowship Conference is being held in Portsmouth and these people were planning to come to London to visit the museum, which is the headquarters of the Dickens Fellowship.

“People are so upset. And a lot of these people have sent money for the refurbishment. I hope the decision is not irreversible. There is no reason why a postponement should not happen.”

But there are one or two angles to the plot that Ms Dickens Hawksley has not revealed. One is that Portsmouth, where Dickens was born, has its own Dickens Museum, and that the explosion of celebrations this year will include numerous events in London, Calais, Zurich, New York and even a Dickens exhibition in Hong Kong.

Another is that Charles’s great, great grandson, Mark Dickens, the head of the family and president of the Dickens Fellow­ship, which is based at the museum, approves the closure programme.

“It is exciting to see the plans for the bicentenary of Charles Dickens’s birth come to fruition after many months of planning,” he said. “Expectations are certainly great. I have often wondered why my great great grandfather is still held in such high regard as one of the greatest authors of the English speaking world after so many years, but it is true that his writing is as relevant to society today as it was in Victorian times, and his captivating characters are still all around us.”

Camden Lib Dem councillor Flick Rea, who is deputy chairman of the museum’s trustees, said: “It is a great shame and a disappointment that it has happened this way,” she said. “Nobody wanted to close the museum until December. But it takes ages to organise projects like this and get everything into place. And there were other factors to take into consideration such as the Olympics. The experience in other countries is that the cultural side of tourism drops off during the Olympics.”

Project director Dr Schweizer, himself a Dickens scholar, is adamant that the first duty of the museum’s trustees is to protect the two properties for the future. “Dickens is so important to our heritage and it is our obligation to do this,” he said. “Nobody made us close the museum. The Lottery Fund didn’t put any pressure on us, they didn’t dictate the situation. We decided this was the best time to act in this very special year.”