Charles Dickens’s desk, writing slope, lamp, desk calendar, and chair

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) likely drafted part of his novel Hard Times (1854) while seated in this cane-bottom chair, and he may have written chapters of Great Expectations (1860–1861) at this small mahogany writing desk while bathed in the light of this oil lamp. Dickens almost certainly penned some of his more than 15,000 letters on this writing slope; leather-covered and neatly angled, it would have provided a comfortable surface for his fast-flowing pen. The chair originally decorated Dickens’s office at Household Words, the weekly magazine he edited in the 1850s, but was later moved to his home. This ensemble, including the small desk calendar, all came from Gad’s Hill Place, Dickens’s primary residence for the last decade of his life