Charles Dickens's love of food, glorious food revealed in new exhibition

Charles Dickens's dinner party guests would never have to ask for more — nor will visitors to an exhibition about his love of food.

They will be able to immerse themselves in the scene of a typical lavish party, which is being recreated at the Dickens Museum, once the author’s family home.

Guest curator Pen Vogler, author of Dinner With Dickens, used first-hand accounts from the novelist’s guests to make it as accurate as possible.

Visitors can choose to be a guest or a servant for differing views on life in the Dickens household in Doughty Street, Bloomsbury. One artefact on display is an inventory of beer, wine and spirits in Dickens’s handwriting. Some culinary scenes in the novels, such as the feast in A Christmas Carol, are also being recreated.

Ms Vogler said Dickens’s love of food came from his poverty-stricken childhood. He would often go hungry, a fact which inspired the famous scene in which Oliver Twist asks Mr Bumble for more at the workhouse. She said: “What Dickens does with food is show how essential it is for your psychological comfort, your emotional comfort. So he uses hungry children like poor little Oliver to show that if they don’t know where their next meal is coming from, how you can never feel at ease, you don’t feel looked after, you don’t feel loved.

“That came very directly from his own experience. For him food was about sharing and a way of bringing people together, which is why in the museum we’ve done it as ‘come to dinner with Dickens’.”

Food Glorious Food runs from November 28 to April 22.