The London townhouse where Charles Dickens penned Oliver Twist and fathered two of his 10 children has just reopened after a £3.1 million (HK$ 39.06 million) facelift as the climax of the bicentenary of his birth.

The Georgian edifice in Bloomsbury – now the Charles Dickens Museum – has been refurbished in time for Christmas, a tradition that the author helped develop with his 1843 novel A Christmas Carol.