‘All the watering places are crammed with hot people’: on holiday with Dickens

Exhibition at Charles Dickens Museum in London looks at writer’s holiday pursuits, from Kent to the Isle of Wight It’s summer in the city, the pubs are crowded, and the coast beckons. In a year that has so far brought five significant heatwaves, it is a fair description of the current holiday season. But the same was true, too, of the much less frequent hot, dry summers of the past, including 186 years ago when Charles Dickens put pen to paper in anticipation of escaping London for the sea…