Exhibition in London will explore the author’s lifelong fascination with the paranormal.
For many people, a haunted house is a place to avoid. But in 1859,
Charles Dickens was actively seeking a place where he might be “molested” by a ghost.
Dickens had a lifelong fascination with the paranormal – an interest reflected in the inclusion of spirits, spectres and phantoms in his stories. From October, it will be the subject of an exhibition at the house in central
London where the author and his family lived in the late 1830s, now the Charles Dickens Museum.
Among the exhibits is a letter, never displayed before, from the author to William Howitt. Dickens asks whether the spiritualist and fellow writer can suggest “any haunted house whatsoever within the limits of the United Kingdom where nobody can live, eat, drink, stand, lie or sleep without sleep-molestation” that he and his friend John Hollingshead might visit.
