The Old Curiosity Shop — London's Greatest Literary Fake

The Old Curiosity Shop on Portsmouth Street in London is a sixteenth-century building famous for being a literary fake never actually connected to Charles Dickens. Built from salvaged ship wood, the structure survived the 1666 Great Fire of London and the Blitz. Between 1868 and 1877, a second-hand book dealer added the famous title above the door to drum up business, successfully fooling tourists for over 150 years.

London · from the walk “Secrets of Lincoln's Inn Fields” · audio ~3 min · Generated

The Old Curiosity Shop, 13-14 Portsmouth Street, London WC2A 2ES

Was the Old Curiosity Shop on Portsmouth Street actually the inspiration for Charles Dickens's novel?

Look at this crooked, wonky little building in front of you. Two storeys of timber and plaster, leaning like a tipsy sailor... surrounded on all sides by the sleek modern campus of the London School of Economics. This is the Old Curiosity Shop... and it is one of London's Greatest literary frauds.......... Dating from the sixteenth century, its sloping roof, overhanging second floor, and uneven Tudor gabling mark it as one of London's oldest shops. This unique building, constructed from salvaged ship wood, survived not only the Great Fire of London in sixteen sixty-six, but the devastation of the Blitz.......... Now look above the door. You'll see the words "Immortalised by Charles Dickens." But was it really? Here's where the story gets delicious.......... A letter by Charles Tesseyman, published in the Echo newspaper on the thirty-first of December eighteen eighty-three, reveals the truth: his brother, who occupied number fourteen Portsmouth Street between eighteen sixty-eight and eighteen seventy-seven, had the words "The Old Curiosity Shop" placed over the front for Purely business purposes, as likely to attract custom to his shop. That's right... a second-hand book dealer simply slapped a famous title on his storefront to drum up trade.......... And it Worked. An American journalist, B. E. Martin, spotted the sign during a visit and published a literary tour of Dickens's London in Scribner's Monthly in May eighteen eighty-one. Martin admitted the connection to Dickens was "a fable, a pleasing delusion," but the article contained a sketch of the quaint old building, and tourists soon began to search for it.......... Then came the panic of eighteen eighty-three! The shop's celebrity dramatically increased when a series of press articles reported that it was under threat of demolition, after a neighbouring building had partially collapsed. American collectors of Dickensiana were purportedly "quite ready to purchase the ruins, and fix them up in Boston or Philadelphia," while others demanded loose bricks as mementoes.......... But here's what most people never learn. Dickens himself, in the novel, wrote that the old shop "had long been pulled down, and a fine broad road was in its place." And such highly reliable witnesses as Georgina Hogarth, Dickens's own sister-in-law, and the actor Sir John Hare identified the Real location as Green Street, now Irving Street, behind the National Portrait Gallery.......... So this building? It was Never the inspiration. And yet... the lie became more powerful than the truth. By the early nineteen hundreds, waggonettes laden with visitors were constantly arriving to see the curious little house. By the nineteen thirties, it was essentially a Dickens-themed gift shop aimed at tourists, with a sister shop beside Anne Hathaway's cottage at Stratford-upon-Avon.......... The building itself began life, it's believed, as a dairy on the neighbouring estate of Louise de Kérouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, a mistress of King Charles the Second, from which Portsmouth Street gets its name.......... So take a good long look. This tiny, lopsided survivor... it's not what it claims to be, and it never was. But it has outlasted the Great Fire, the Blitz, and countless demolition threats. Perhaps the Real curiosity here is the building itself... a genuine fake that fooled the world for over a hundred and fifty years.

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