On Saturday 1st December, 21 people including 2 young children met at Dickens World at Chatham in North Kent.

This museum showed us some events or characters arising from the books of Charles Dickens, a famous writer from the Victoria times.

We found the old fashioned looking buildings to be impressive, we went on a boat ride underneath and some of us got wet!

We entered into Dotheboys School where we sat behind straight rows of wooden benches with a teacher wearing a long black gown and holding a cane. He asked us questions and, one of us, Kim Morgan gave a wrong answer so had to be told to sit in a corner with a ‘D’ hat. David Foot was caught pulling funny faces and the teacher punished him by asking him to sit in a corner again with the ‘D’ hat.

We visited the Haunted House where we saw a ‘film’ of Scrooge being haunted by ghosts as described in Charles Dickens “Christmas Carol”.

We went to a 4D cinema where we wore special spectacles to see a film being shown in 3D plus a spray of water with a smell falling onto us.

Lastly some of us bought some books from the main shop as we would like to know more about Charles Dickens who had 10 children by his first wife and got married again for the second times. Through his writings (there were about 14 books), he drew the attention of the public to all human life from the poorest to the wealthiest in 19th century society. He travelled to America and Europe. He died at the age of 58 in 1870.

Finally many thanks go to Barbara Hayes and Louise Culver for their interpreting efforts and to Barry Hartwell for organising this event.

Janet Richards