Rare Charles Dickens items to go on show at museum

A chalk and pastel sketch of Dickens at the time when he was living in Doughty Street

A collection of rarely-seen items connected to 19th century writer Charles Dickens are to go on show at the London museum dedicated to his life and work.

The new exhibit marks 100 years since Dickens's first family home in Doughty Street, Bloomsbury, escaped demolition and became the Charles Dickens Museum.

The exhibition, which runs from February until the end of June, will display for the first time a chalk and pastel sketch of Dickens at the time when he was living there.

Dickens wrote the stories that made him an international literary superstar - The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby - while living at the house.

This copy of David Copperfield was read by Captain Scott's men in Antarctica

Among the treasures is a blubber-stained copy of David Copperfield taken to Antarctica by Captain Scott's 1910-12 Terra Nova expedition.

Stranded in an ice cave, the crew read a chapter every night for sixty nights, and the book is blackened with their fingerprints, likely to have been due to the seal blubber fire that heated the cave.

Also on display will be the work of Dickens' favourite illustrators, including Hablot Knight Browne, John Leech, George Cruikshank and Fred Barnard, and preliminary drawings for the first publication of A Christmas Carol.

Cindy Sughrue, director of the museum, said the exhibition will feature personal effects, portraits, photographs and historic items that will illuminate the life and works of Charles Dickens.

She added: "Gathered together over the past century and displayed in Dickens's only surviving house in London, a beacon at the centre of the urban landscape quintessentially associated with the writer, the Museum in Doughty Street will be filled with objects that define Dickens's life and the Museum's history."

Dickens lived in the property in Bloomsbury with his wife and son from 1837 to 1839 and it is the only surviving London house in which Dickens lived.

The Dickens in Doughty Street: 100 Years of the Charles Dickens Museum exhibit will be on show at the museum from 5 February.