Exhibition: Faithful Companions: Charles Dickens & his Pets

This is the first exhibition to celebrate the animals that found their way into the books and homes of Charles Dickens.

It throws a spotlight on to the dogs, ravens, goldfinches and cats who shared houseroom with the Dickens family, as well as Dickens’s horses and the animals that became characters in stories such as Oliver Twist, Bleak House and Barnaby Rudge.

Featuring handwritten letters, Dickens family picture albums, photographs and beautiful illustrations, the exhibition reveals the animals that shared Dickens’s life. It's full of tales of Dickens’s pets, including the household havoc caused by beloved raven Grip, who loved an inappropriate peck, became a character in Barnaby Rudge and was believed to have been the inspiration for Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven; and Bob the cat, who regularly put out Dickens’s reading light in a persistent bid for attention.

Many of the tales are told by Charles Dickens himself in a series of rarely-seen letters.

In the first half of the 19th century, when the Dickens family lived at Doughty Street, London had become a city full of animals, with cattle heading to Smithfield Market, dogs performing in the streets and horses pulling carts and omnibuses. A great chronicler of society, Dickens captured this Victorian profusion of animals in his stories and his journals.

48 Doughty Street is where he wrote the stories that made him an international superstar. When Dickens and his young family moved into the home in the 1830s, he was a budding author, unknown to most, but by the time the family left, Dickens was world famous, having written a trio of wildly successful novels - The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby – in his study at home.