Exhibition on how food shaped the literature of Charles Dickens

A new exhibition begins today, exploring how Charles Dickens used food as social commentary and how childhood hunger shaped his political views.

Food Glorious Food: Dinner With Dickens will run until April 22 next year at the Charles Dickens Museum in London.

It celebrates the way the famous writer used food and drink to explore the lives of his characters in books like A Christmas Carol and Hard Times.

The exhibition will be held at his former home at 48 Doughty Street in Bloomsbury where he lived with his family and held “party after party” with invitations that would have been “impossible to refuse”.

The collection will also explore how Dickens’ memories of childhood hunger made their way into his stories, like in Oliver Twist where the boy famously said: “Please Sir, I want some more.”

The exhibition will include a silver fruit bowl given to Dickens in 1870 by a reader and a letter, written by novelist Elizabeth Gaskell in 1849, describing a dinner at Dickens’ townhouse.

Louisa Price, curator at the Charles Dickens Museum, said: “We have handwritten notes to wineries, lists of contents of his cellar, invitations that would have been impossible to refuse, a note in which he organises the household condiments and a cheque book full of stubs showing evidence of party after party.”

Co-curator Pen Vogler said: “Food is everywhere in Dickens’s stories and almost always significant; consider the importance of Pip’s stolen pie in Great Expectations or the prize Turkey that Scrooge gives in A Christmas Carol.

“Food, and the lack of it, is so central to Dickens’s work that it comes as a real surprise that the hunger of his childhood years was not revealed until his biography was published shortly after his death.”

Picture: PA. The dining roomat the Charles Dickens Museum in Doughty Street in London, where the exhibition will he held.