Dickens campaigners get launch off to flying start (From Gazette & Herald)

Dickens campaigners get launch off to flying start

9:18am Thursday 21st August 2008

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MALTON’S campaign to use its links with the Victorian classic author Charles Dickens to help turn around its struggling economy got off to a bumper start last Saturday when the newly-formed Charles Dickens Group staged an awareness day.

Throughout the day a stream of interested local people went to the former Dodsworth’s furniture store which had been transformed into an exhibition celebrating Dickens’s links with Malton and the history of the town itself.

Secretary Linda McCarthy, a retired teacher from Kent, said the initial aim is to open the Chancery Lane office where Dickens set his famous story “A Christmas Carol”, using it as the setting of the counting house of Ebenezer Scrooge and his down-trodden clerk, Bob Cratchit.

Work on bringing that to reality is expected to start next year when the existing lease on the building, currently a storeroom for a firm of accountants, expires.

Before that, however, there are plans to have what she described as “a taster” Dickens Festival to coincide with the continental market which is being staged leading up to Christmas.

Eventually, said Linda, it is hoped that a Dickens Experience Centre might be established, providing Malton with “hands-on history” using the latest IT and inter-active techniques.

A meeting has already been held with Ryedale District Council officers to discuss possible funding of the Scrooge Counting House venture.

“We had a good cross section of the public to see the exhibition and the artefax relating to Dickens,” said Linda. “It was encouraging that so many shops provided us with prizes to help raise funds. Overall we had a very positive response.

“I feel strongly that Malton needs to keep its uniqueness and character.”

One of the stalwarts of the new venture is John Collins, a local historian who has created a Dickens trail around Malton, focussing on places where the author was known to have visited, among them St Michael’s Church, the old theatre in Saville Street where he gave a public reading, York House where his friend Charles Smithson lived, and The Talbot Hotel, once a major staging post for horse drawn carriages en route to London.

“Almost everyone over the age of 10 has heard of Charles Dickens whether by reading his books at school, through such musicals as “Oliver!” and “Pickwick”, as well as the big screen films and television adaptations of his classics,” said John.

He has discovered that the bells featured in “A Christmas Carol” were those of St Leonard’s, then a Church of England church, now the Catholic Church in Malton.

Copies of Dickens’s handwritten correspondence on show at the exhibition, showed he had great enthusiasm for Malton while another item from the Yorkshire Gazette covered Dickens’s visits. “There are lots of places we know Dickens would have been associated with when he came to Malton,” added John.

Historian Sid Woodhams had an extensive range of memorabilia of Malton’s past on display, which he has built up over 59 years. Among the many items was a £1 bank note issued by Malton Bank, and details of Malton winning the world curling championships in 1893.

“A lot of people who came to the awareness day didn’t appreciate the strong connections between Dickens and Malton,” said Sid, whose unique collection spans 150 years of Malton’s history.

He is hopeful that a new museum, focussing on Dickens, could include a considerable amount of historic material on Malton itself.

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