The so-called lost portrait of Charles Dickens has been discovered after 174 years in South Africa.

The picture of Rochester’s most famous son, as an emerging literary star at the age of 31 was unearthed in a trinket box in KwaZulu-Natal.

This week it is on show in the novelist’s study at the Charles Dickens Museum in London where he wrote the classics Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and The Pickwick Papers.

And now enthusiasts have launched a campaign to raise £180,000 to bring the miniature portrait into the museum’s permanent collection and place it on public display.

Among those supporting the initiative are members of the Rochester and Chatham Dickens’ Fellowship.

Secretary Steve Martin said the organisation which has branches throughout the world had made a “substantial” donation.

It is not clear how the picture, painted by Margaret Gillies in late 1843, ended up thousands of miles away in the south eastern province of the continent.

Last seen in public in 1844 at an exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, it has returned to the UK in time for the 175th anniversary of his masterpiece, A Christmas Carol.

Despite attempts to locate it during her lifetime, even Gillies herself was at a loss to know what happened to it, reporting it unaccounted for in 1886.

There is a possibility that it arrived via one of two sons of art critic George Henry Lewes, partner to Mary Ann Evans who wrote under the name of George Eliot, who both emigrated to South Africa in the 1860s.

Both Dickens and Gillies were close to the Lewes family and Gillies’ adopted daughter was married to another of Lewes’ sons.

The portrait was found at a bric-a-brac sale in a tray containing antiques, an old recorder, a brass dish and a metal lobster.

Suspecting the item could be of note, its purchaser contacted arts dealer Philip Mould and Company whose experts have conserved it.

Mr Martin, said while the fellowship supports the cause to give the portrait a permanent home in the UK, its main campaign remains to restore the Dickens Chalet in Rochester.

He said: “Personally I would like to see more cash to carry out vital repairs on the chalet.

“Our latest lottery bid failed and we are in the process of finding out why.”

The dilapidated structure stands in Eastgate Gardens, just off Rochester High Street.

The exhibition, entitled The Lost Portrait, runs at the museum at 48 Doughty Street, Holborn, WC1N 2LX until this Sunday.

It is open 10am to 5pm from Tuesday to Sunday and the last admission each day is at 4pm.

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