It’s seen some hard times but thanks to mutual friends Charles Dickens’ writing chalet is no longer a bleak house, reports Alex Johnson

Sometimes – brace yourself – people don’t look after their sheds properly. Worse, they don’t look after other people’s sheds either. The Bletchley Park huts were on their last legs before fundraisers came up trumps at the last moment. There’s an ongoing campaign to restore Arthur Miller’s writing studio in Connecticut (last seen in a shabby car park) in which he wrote The Crucible. And now happily it appears that Charles Dickens’ marvellous but increasingly decrepit timber writing chalet in Rochester could be saved for the nation.

The chalet has had a chequered history. It came to Dickens in 1864 as a prefab present from Anglo-French actor-sculptor Charles Fechter, all the way from Switzerland to Dickens’ home in Gad’s Hill, Kent, in about 100 sections and in more than 55 packing cases. The great man had a go at putting it together with some chums but – perhaps partly because the instructions were in French – gave up and got professionals in to finish the job.

“The châlet is going on excellently,” he wrote in a letter to his biographer John Forster, on 7 June, 1865, “though the ornamental part is more slowly put together than the substantial. It will really be a very pretty thing; and in the summer (supposing it not to be blown away in the spring) the upper room will make a charming study. It is much higher than we supposed.”

Once up, Dickens was hugely pleased with the result. Here’s an excerpt from a letter to a friend mentioned by John Forster in his The Life of Charles Dickens (1872):

“My room is up among the branches of the trees; and the birds and the butterflies fly in and out, and the green branches shoot in at the open windows, and the lights and shadows of the clouds come and go with the rest of the company. The scent of the flowers, and indeed of everything that is growing for miles and miles, is most delicious.”

The two-storey Swiss shed was essentially two square rooms on top of each other, with an exterior staircase to get to the first floor. They were both nicely furnished with leather chairs, tables, and several mirrors to help him rehearse for the public readings of his works he loved giving. Forster quotes the novelist’s son-in-law Charles Collins’s description of the objects Dickens kept on the desk in the chalet:

“There was a French bronze group representing a duel with swords, fought by a couple of very fat toads… a statuette of a dog-fancier… the long gilt leaf with the rabbit sitting erect upon its haunches, the huge paper-knife often held in his hand during his public readings, and the little fresh green cup ornamented with leaves and blossoms of the cowslip, in which a few fresh flowers were always placed every morning.”

Oddly, the chalet was not erected in his back garden but on a piece of land he owned across the road from his house, which meant he had to build an underpass to reach it.

Much used by Dickens during his lifetime, on his death its story became significantly rockier. It was nearly sold to a buyer in America who wanted it for a touring exhibition there, then moved lock, stock, and barrel to Cobham Park in Surrey, and finally to Eastgate House in Rochester in 1961 where it has stood ever since, surviving a mooted move to the town’s esplanade to boost tourism.

All this time, it was slowly disintegrating. There was some minor refurbishment in 2000 but it has been closed to the public for decades as funding for its full repair has not been forthcoming.

Things now look a little rosier. A partnership between Medway Council and the Friends of Eastgate House has been forged, in their words “to revive and reimagine Dickens’ Writing Chalet as a vibrant cultural space for the community”. This seems a sound idea, turning it into some form of arts and education venue as well as a celebration of Dickens and other writers with Rochester connections. It’s exactly what the team working on saving Arthur Miller’s equivalent across The Pond are planning to do. The chalet was even opened up to the public again in 2025, though on a very limited basis. The National Lottery Heritage Fund is also making very positive noises, so fingers crossed.

To keep up to date with what’s happening at both sites, go to charlesdickenschalet.co.uk and arthurmillerstudio.org.

Alex Johnson runs Shedworking (shedworking.co.uk) and his book The Philosophy of Sheds is forthcoming from the British Library in June.

This article is from Idler #108.

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