To celebrate the exact 155th anniversary of Charles Dickens‘s death and the 100th anniversary of the opening of the Charles Dickens Museum in London, the museum will be free of charge to all visitors on June 9 when it will also be guest-stewarded by members of the writer’s family.

Among the members of the Dickens family welcoming visitors will be:

• Lucinda Dickens Hawksley (great-great-great-granddaughter) who will also give a talk about Dickens’s international travels
• Gerald Dickens (great-great-grandson) who will discuss the Staplehurst train crash on the 160th anniversary of the Kent train derailment which Dickens survived and which inspired him to write ghost story The Signalman
• Mark Dickens (great-great-grandson) who will read A Christmas Carol in Dickens’s study alongside the ‘Lost Portrait’, painted while Dickens was writing perhaps his most famous story
• Ian Dickens (great-great-grandson) reading David Copperfield
• Ollie Dickens (great-great-great-grandson) who will read from Oliver Twist in the room in which the story was written

The Museum’s birthday exhibition, Dickens in Doughty Street: 100 Years of the Charles Dickens is a celebration of the life of Dickens and the museum, running through June 29.