The Curious World of Dickens by Clive Hurst & Violet Moller (Bodleian, £15.99) is a lavishly illustrated companion to the Dickens exhibition at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

It is based on the vast John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera — that is, throwaway items — and includes the great man’s first surviving letter, written when he was a schoolboy, playbills, maps of old London, the green wrappers within which the novels first appeared, and much more. There is a newspaper account of the train accident in which Dickens and his mistress Ellen Ternan were involved, although she is not mentioned, of course.

Indeed, railways are a constant presence in his books, as are prisons and workhouses. So we have accounts of public executions, which he hated and campaigned against, and a picture of a condemned cell, and a “table for calculating provisions consumed” in a workhouse – tea, sugar, butter, cheese etc. That is the dark Dickens, so admired in our own time. But there was also a cheerful Dickens who loved acting, practically invented the modern Christmas and described lavish imaginary feasts.

His wife, perhaps with his help, published a little book called What Shall We Have for Dinner?, which contains some menus very different from workhouse fare — salmon, asparagus soup, fore quarter of lamb, fricassee chicken, lobster patties, ‘ice pudding’ and other luxuries, all to be taken at one sitting! We’re also told how a middle-class family entertained itself in the evenings; cards, music and toy theatres were among their diversions when they were not reading novels aloud. It is a fascinating book and the exhibition is not to be missed.

* The Bodleian exhibition, celebrating Dickens’s bicentenary, is free and runs until October 28. A series of talks starts on Monday.