Historic writer’s desk could be ‘knackered’ old fake

Dickens wrote of the sisters being in “great poverty, but undemonstrative and uncomplaining, though very old – with nothing to speak of in the wide world, but the plain fir desk on which Johnson wrote his English Dictionary”.

Such pleas from Dickens helped to raise large donations for the sisters, with the desk being saved as a “proud possession to the English nation”.

But Celine Luppo McDaid, director of the Dr Johnson House, says it is now seems unclear whether this desk was actually Johnson’s.

The case for it being authentic, she says, is that the sisters could have been thinking: “We’ve sold everything else, but we still have this treasured desk, it’s the last thing we have.”

Or else it might have been a chance to turn a bit of spare furniture into a financial lifeline.

“They might have seen an opportunity and decided that the knackered old desk in the corner was ‘Johnson’s desk’,” says the museum director Ms McDaid.