Report: Birthday Dinner at the Garrick

The Garrick Club in central London was the venue for the annual celebration of Dickens’s birthday. We are grateful to Dr Nicholas Cambridge for hosting us on the premises of the Club Dickens joined, and resigned from, on three separate occasions. Our President, Lucinda Dickens Hawksley, took the Chair and, wearing her metaphorical art historian’s hat, remarked how appropriate it was for us to be dining in a room dominated by a splendid seascape painted by Dickens’s great friend Clarkson Stanfield. The toast to the Immortal Memory was proposed by the former editor of this journal, Professor Malcolm Andrews, who ruminated on the topic of Memory as experienced by Dickens when in the vicinity of the Garrick Club. Malcolm considered the memories that must have been evoked in the last decade of Dickens’s life when his rail journey from Gad’s Hill took him into Charing Cross station – built on the site of Hungerford Stairs, and when his chosen route from there to his offices in Wellington Street skirted Chandos Street – both locations where the child Dickens had laboured in the infamous Warren’s blacking warehouses. The toast to the Dickens Fellowship was proposed by former Honorary General Secretary Paul Graham, who praised the achievement of our predecessors in establishing the Charles Dickens Museum one hundred years ago. Helen Howe, a member of the Management Committee, responded - thanking both the Joint Honorary General Secretaries, Jacquie Stamp and Sati McKenzie, for organising such an enjoyable event, before proposing the final toast of the evening to The President of the Dickens Fellowship.   Transcripts:

Toast to the Immortal Memory 
Toast to the Fellowship 
Response and toast to the President