"But although he kept his mind open because he loved storytelling, Dickens was very much against people exploiting those who were grieving, and the older he got, the more vocal he was in speaking up against these types of fraudsters."

Dickens' views on the subject may have been hardened by an experience in June 1865, when a train he was on was involved in a fatal accident at Staplehurst in Kent. He tended the injured and dying, later writing of the trauma he suffered as a consequence — an incident touched upon at the exhibition.