Dickens book read by Scott's doomed team on show for centenary of museum

A seal blubber-stained copy of Charles Dickens' David Copperfield that survived Captain Scott's 1910 expedition to Antarctica will form part of an exhibition marking 100 years since the writer's first London home opened as a museum.

- Caroline Davies

Hundreds of people crammed into the Georgian terrace in Bloomsbury in 1925, spilling onto the pavement, as 48 Doughty Street was saved from demolition 55 years after the death of its most famous resident.

Lord Birkenhead told crowds at the museum's official opening: "I cannot help thinking that he would have cherished the knowledge that the house which he first rented in London, and to which he brought his young wife, the house in which Oliver Twist and Wackford Squeers and Kate Nickleby were all born, was for all time to be made available to the admirers of his genius."

A century later at the Charles Dickens Museum, where The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby were written, Dickens in Doughty Street: 100 Years of the Charles Dickens Museum will showcase its collections, with some items seen for the first time.