Those who marvel at nothing ought to read Dickens, for then they will surely know how to marvel.
Robert Walser

As the twelve-year-old Charles Dickens pasted labels onto jars of black shoe polish in 1824 in a London factory teeming with rats, no one imagined the glorious future that lay ahead for the boy.
Like his later protagonist Oliver Twist, the young Charles would not be content with the thin gruel dished out by the miserly hand of fate, but demanded more from life – infinitely more! Only a dozen years after the humiliating drudgery in the factory, Dickens advanced to become the most popular author of his time: a writing career that could not have been more improbable. And he went on to grace the world with more than just Oliver Twist – infinitely more! Fifteen extensive novels, five major Christmas stories, two travel books along with letters and journalistic texts covering thousands of pages bear witness to an almost manic energy that left Dickens’s contemporaries captivated and baffled … and even today continues to pose riddles.

The pervasive usage of the adjective Dickensian in everyday language is just one of many testaments to the sustained popularity of this author in the Anglo-Saxon world. At the same time, however, such a trademark can be problematic, with the cliché of the cosily gruesome Dickens of Oliver Twist or A Christmas Carol all too often obscuring the increasingly caustic and precise social criticism in the powerful tableaus of the last two decades of his life.

The author tended to be unsparing both with his energies and his abundant imagination – an exuberance that took its physical toll, but also allowed him to create an œuvre of virtually unparalleled storytelling and rich imagery. And because nearly all his books were published with original illustrations by masters of their craft such as George Cruikshank and Hablôt Knight Browne, characters like Fagin, Pecksniff, Micawber and Mrs. Gamp are even more deeply entrenched in the collective consciousness.

The exhibition traces Dickens’s biography and, with numerous film and audio clips, gives life to the inimitable “voice” of his style, a voice to which we must “surrender ourselves”, as Nabokov once said. Also illuminated are the many mysteries that are as richly plentiful in the life of this author as in his work.

The key exhibition texts are also available in English. Please ask for the booklet at the ticket desk.