Charles Dickens was a famous author who lived in a house in London for a while.
The house is now a museum. Have you been?
You should go now, because they have decorated it for Christmas, and Charles Dickens wrote a very famous story about Christmas once.
Sadly, Charles Dickens died, but many years later another book was written about his life.
The book was published by Ladybird, as part of a series about famous people, and they decided Charles Dickens is famous.
They also asked a famous artist to paint pictures to go inside the book. The famous man is called John Kenney, and he also drew pictures of Thomas the Tank Engine.
The museum is in a nice house, and it has a spare room. That room now has lots of the paintings hanging on the walls.
You can go into the museum and look at the paintings, and read the text from the Ladybird book which has been put underneath the paintings.
There is also a modern comment to help you understand the meaning of the paintings.
The book was called An Adventure from History: Charles Dickens, and was the 24th book illustrated by Kenney. He worked on 27 Ladybird books in total.
Charles Dickens was Victorian, but the paintings look like a distinctly 1960s vision of what Victorian life might have been like.
A picture of Dickens holding a goose quill is said to be correct because he wrote with a quill, not a typewriter.
The painting is wrong though, as the feathers would have been trimmed for use. The idea that quills kept their feathers is a modern invention.
The artist Kenney painted trains, but also had to paint a train crash. Charles Dickens was in the crash, and never fully recovered from the shock of the accident.
Charles Dickens used the experience though in one of his stories, Our Mutual Friend.
You can visit the museum, and see the paintings and read the words. It costs £9 to go inside.
