📍48 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LX, UK
1837 – 1839“I signed a three-year lease on 48 Doughty Street in March 1837, at eighty pounds a year — a respectable Georgian terrace in Bloomsbury, behind gates kept by a porter. For a man who had once pasted labels on pots of blacking while his father sat in a debtors' prison, it was proof that I had arrived. Catherine and I moved in with our baby son, my younger brother, and Catherine's sister Mary, who was seventeen, bright and full of fun, and who read my manuscripts before anyone else. Six weeks later she was taken ill after an evening at the theatre and died in my arms upstairs. I wore her ring for the rest of my life, and I put her into my books — she is Rose Maylie, and later Little Nell. In the first-floor study of this house I finished Pickwick, wrote the whole of Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, and began Barnaby Rudge. Two daughters were born here. In under three years the house had made me a household name, and we outgrew it. It has been the Charles Dickens Museum since 1925.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today