Exhibition: Food Glorious Food: Dinner with Dickens

On the 175th anniversary of the publication of A Christmas Carol, as Charles Dickens’s first family home is dressed for Christmas, a new exhibition at the Charles Dickens Museum explores the pivotal role of food in the author’s life and novels and give new insights into the experience of dining with Dickens.

Food Glorious Food: Dinner with Dickens investigates Dickens’s relationship with food and the epic menus of dishes and drinks served by the Dickens family to their many guests.

It shows his dinner parties – full of activity, wit, comedy and people and their peculiarities – were essential food for his imagination.

The exhibition also examines the deep-lying reason for Dickens’s need to entertain and share food – his hidden childhood memories of hunger – and his belief, made clear in his stories, that rich and poor alike had the right to enjoy food and drink and that children deserved the security of proper meals.

The exhibition Also features household culinary items used by Dickens and will draw on letters and first-hand accounts by Dickens’s dinner guests to build a vivid picture of the experience of enjoying dinner with Dickens.