The last home of Charles Dickens, Gad's Hill Place in Kent, a private property that his passionate fans besieged in his lifetime and ever since, will open to the general public for the first time this summer.

Gad's Hill was the house near Rochester that Dickens first saw and coveted when he was a child, bought for £1,700 in 1856 when he was the world's most famous novelist, and where he died on a sofa in the dining room on 9 June 1870. The month-long public opening is a trial run for an ambitious plan to transform the house into a permanent museum.

The house has been a school since the 1920s, and news of the opening, with original contents returning for the first time since they were scattered at auction after Dickens's death, is expected to attract fans from all over the world. Since 1870 it has only been open for occasional groups and special events.

The headmaster, David Craggs, regularly finds pilgrims peering through the railings, or standing beseechingly at the plum-coloured front door, flanked by benches that Dickens claimed were made from timber from Shakespeare's house in Stratford-on-Avon. He has sometimes taken pity on people from Alaska or Australia. But fans usually get no further than the front hall, the staircase painted by Dickens' daughter Kate, and the gravestones propped by the study door of his dog, Mrs Bouncer, and canary, Dick ("the best of birds"), who lived to the age of 10 sustained by a spoonful of sherry every day.

Charles Dickens reading to his daughters at Gad's Hill Place.

In term time, every inch of the building is in use. Dickens's bedroom is the maths classroom, the dumbwaiter he added now daily serves 400 school dinners, the conservatory he built – and where he hung Chinese lanterns days before his death – set up as the dining room, and the original dining room now the serving area. "He died just there by the window where our baked potato oven is," said Sally Hergest, administrator of the trust that is taking responsibility for the historic rooms.

Gad's Hill will open a few months after another Dickens house closes, to the baffled fury of many supporters.

The Kent opening is being organised by the Charles Dickens Museum in Doughty Street, his last remaining London home, which holds the largest Dickens collection in the world and has led the celebrations for this bicentenary of his birth. The trustees' decision to close on 9 April for most of the rest of the bicentenary year, for a £3.2m redevelopment backed by a £2.4m Heritage Lottery Fund grant, was greeted with incredulity by many supporters and some in the museum world.

The director, Florian Schweizer, said the museum had been intended to close last year, but failed to raise the remaining funds in time. "Now we have the money, we have the team, and we have the window to carry out this work at a time when there are an unprecedented number of other Dickens events for people to enjoy. And obviously it allows us to offer the unique experience of Gad's Hill Place."

Lucinda Hawksley, Dickens's biographer, his great great great grand-daughter and a patron of the museum, is unconvinced: "It's completely crazy to close this year when London will be full of tourists for the diamond jubilee and the Olympics, when the charity had the opportunity to generate a substantial profit for the first time. I know of people from as far away as Australia who had been saving up to come to London this year, and they just cannot believe it."

Schweizer promises Doughty Street will reopen in December, in time for its annual Christmas celebrations – on 25 December it is the only museum open in the capital.

Meanwhile objects from the collection are being loaned to exhibitions, including one opening in June at Watts Gallery near Guildford.

Gad's Hill Place, where Dickens lived with his sister-in-law as housekeeper after his brutal separation from his wife, Catherine, and entertained on an epic scale with a cellar fit for a wine merchant, was sold soon after his death from a stroke, aged 58. The contents were scattered – although a door designed as a fake bookcase, with titles including The Life of a Cat in nine volumes, which Dickens brought from his home in Tavistock Square, remains in the best preserved room, his study.

The team from Doughty Street will organise and staff the opening, and bring back original contents including Dickens's desk and writing chair, the backdrop from one of his elaborate amateur theatricals that hung in the hall, and the sideboard from the dining room. Visitors will also see the trees Dickens planted for privacy, and the tunnel he built under the busy main road to escape unseen to his writing hut in a separate garden.

Hawksley still regards the decision to close Doughty Street as unfathomable. "I'm absolutely delighted that Gad's Hill is opening, I think it's fantastic that people will be able to see it for the first time. But that is no substitute for keeping the museum in London open. If Dickens were alive he would be writing hilarious articles ridiculing the incompetence of the trustees."

Admission to Gad's Hill Place will be by pre-booked ticket. Inquiries to events@dickensmuseum.com