My mistake: I went to the museum hoping to see the copy of David Copperfield that accompanied Scott and his men on the Terra Nova expedition, but that’s not until February.

No matter: I was able to photograph some of the coal hole covers I’d noticed before in Doughty Street.

The museum was quite interesting. Dickens and his wife lived there from 1837-39; they arrived with one child and left with three. It’s an early-Victorian middle-class house with a few items of furniture that came from Dickens’s final home in Gads Hill. I confess that what really grabbed me was a portrait of Catherine Dickens with an overmantel in her lap. In a display case below her was an overmantel that she embroidered some years later – which sent me back to Tirzah Garwood and her endless creations. The difference was that Garwood made her own designs and sold her work, but the image of two women across a century with hands forever at work remained with me.