Yes, the torrent of books and articles about Charles Dickens just keeps on going. Today, we learn that Dickens had a lifelong obsession with home decoration thanks to this great piece in The Guardian.

He wrote an article called “Household Scenery”, for a journal called Household Words and penned 6,000 words on wall coverings from tapestries to wallpapers to tackling rising damp.

I love the idea of Dickens – the man who wrote about orphans and workhouses – doing a reno in old London town. He’d take a bleak house in some east London slum, do it up and then flip it at a huge profit.