Home Is a Name

the museum offers "Christmas by Candlelight" dinners Charles Dickens Museum

Houzz, in case you're not familiar with it, is a great website about, well, houses. It's absolutely packed with photographs and descriptions of every possible thing having to do with them, inside to outside, basements to attics, and everything in between. But my intention here is not to promote the website, it's to point you toward a recent posting of theirs. In keeping with the season, they're offering a "guided" (in that one reads the accompanying text) tour of 48 Doughty Street, London, in which resided, for a time, one Charles Dickens (1812-1870), and it's delicious. Apparently, the author and social critic lived in several different places in the city, but this is the only one remaining, and it's preserved as a museum. He moved there with his wife and firstborn when he was 25, and the family lived there for two years, during which time two more (of their 10!) children were born and the author wrote The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, and more (though not A Christmas Carol; that was published in 1843). It seems he was quite the prolific fellow, in more ways than one (slideshow): http://www.houzz.com/photos/42899992/The-Dickens

   The title of this post comes from Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, the whole quote being "But it was home. And though home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit answered to, in strongest conjuration."