For fans of Charles Dickens and those who would like to know more about him, this  bicentenary exhibition is not to be missed. Streets of Dickens: Holborn, Hampstead, St Pancras is the latest celebration of the author to open in London, and can be seen at Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre, on the second floor of Holborn Library. The Archives are situated conveniently around the corner from the Charles Dickens Museum in Doughty Street (due to close from 10 April-December 2012).

As described in my article for London Historians, ‘Charles Dickens in Camden’, the novelist had many associations with the area. Further links have been discovered by historian Ruth Richardson and are explored in her new book, Dickens and the Workhouse (OUP, 2012).

The exhibition is one of the largest I’ve attended at the Archives, and is well illustrated with copies of photographs, prints and drawings in the collections. Amongst the original items featured are letters by the novelist from the 1830s and 1855, an 1857 Tavistock House Theatre poster, a 1924 drawing of Mr. Pickwick by Joseph Clayton Clerk, and a Burial Register of Highgate Cemetery showing the April 1851 entry of Dickens’ baby daughter, Dora Annie.

All Dickens’ local residencies are covered, such as the now-demolished 16 Bayham Street with its views ‘over the dust-heaps and dock-leaves and fields . . . at the cupola of St. Paul’s’ (John Forster). For those unfamiliar with dust-heaps, the exhibition helpfully provides a print of those in Somers Town 1836 and displays Dickens’ description of them in Our Mutual Friend.

Streets of Dickens is open now until 21 December 2012. Camden LS & Archives, Holborn library, 32-38 Theobalds Road, London is open Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday 10-7; Saturday 10-5. Free entry.