New exhibition traces the theatrical life of Dickens and reveals how we were nearly robbed of some of the greatest books of all time.
Miriam Margolyes, Patron of the Charles Dickens Museum, came to Dickens’s home at 48 Doughty Street, Holborn, last week to launch Showtime!, a new exhibition revealing the love of performing which took hold of Charles Dickens from childhood and exploring the theatre which made Dickens famous in his lifetime and 200 years of productions of his stories for theatre, film, TV, radio and podcast.
The co-writer and solo star of Dickens’ Women – in which she played multiple characters, including Little Nell, Miss Havisham, Mrs Gamp and Mrs Micawber – launched the exhibition ahead of her Edinburgh Festival show Margolyes & Dickens: More Best Bits.
Miriam was joined at the Museum by Lucinda Dickens Hawksley, writer, historian and great-great-great granddaughter of Charles and Catherine Dickens, and Frankie Kubicki, the Director of the Charles Dickens Museum, to discuss the theatrical life of Dickens and the enduring popularity of his greatest stories on stage, screen and radio.
Speaking at the Museum, Miriam said, “If I could have one wish in the world it would be to be in the audience at a Dickens reading. Dickens would have been an actor. He wanted to be an actor but had a cold and missed his audition. That was the end of his being an actor; though he never stopped being an actor really. He was an observer. Dickens had a technique of writing that was very filmic. He starts a little way away and them zooms in.”
Talking of her first experience of the theatre, Miriam said, “I was taken to pantomime in Oxford when little and was so terrified by the villain in Aladdin. I was so frightened, that my parents made an appointment to meet the actor later in the week. I wasn’t scared after that.”
On performing, Miriam said, “The concept of ‘pretend’ is how we develop our imagination. I don’t know what they do in countries where they don’t have pantomime. Performance is something deep in the psyche of human beings.”
While at the Museum, Miriam read Dickens’s own words about the theatre, including an article from 1853 in which he recounts being separated from his family in London as a child, and finding himself in a theatre: (Whenever I saw that my appearance attracted attention, either outside the doors or afterwards within the theatre, I pretended to look out for somebody who was taking care of me, and from whom I was separated, and to exchange nods and smiles with that creature of my imagination…I had my sixpence clutched in my hand ready to pay; and when the doors opened, with a clattering of bolts, and some screaming from women in the crowd, I went on with the current like straw).
Miriam also read a September 1845 letter in which Dickens gives himself a glowing review after performing on stage in Every Man in His Humour by Ben Jonson (Good Heaven how I wish you could have been there! It really was a brilliant sight… As to the acting, modesty forbids me to say more than that it has been the town talk ever since. I have known nothing short of a Murder, to make such a noise before).
Miriam visited 48 Doughty Street’s Drawing Room, where Dickens, his wife Catherine and their young family used to perform plays (the room includes the armchair where Dickens sat to write Oliver Twist while his children played around him). She also had a close look at Charles Dickens’s own acting copy of the play Used Up by Irish playwright Dion Boucicault, heavily marked-up with notes to himself; the engraved ivory theatre pass which gave him free entry to performances at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Haymarket; and the silver cup awarded to Dickens by fellow theatre company members in Montreal.
Actor, writer, director and Museum Patron, Simon Callow, said, “Performing was central to Dickens’s life from a very early age. His father used to take him as a 5-year-old to the local pub, where he would recite and sing…and as soon as he was in paid employment as a 16-year-old, he visited the theatre, as he said, every day of every week. Perhaps the pivotal moment of his life was his cancellation because of illness of an audition with the greatest actor-manager of his day. Instead, he took a job as a parliamentary reporter and then the course of his life was set. But he never stopped writing, directing and performing plays, to say nothing of his extraordinary magic shows in which he appeared as Ria Rhama Roos. All this came to a head in the public readings which he performed for massive and astounded audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. At the end of his life, he told a friend that what he would really like to have done with his life was to have run a theatre. He was the writer as actor, his novels stupendous performances.”
The consistent adaptation of works by Dickens is nothing new; early in his career, when he lived at Doughty Street, two of the great works which first made Dickens famous – The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist (each of which was released in monthly episodes) – were produced on stage before they were even fully published. Dickens’s own adaptations for his one-man stage shows helped to make him a familiar character in his own right, and to fix his popular image across the world in a way that has never faded.
Emma Harper, curator of Showtime!, said, “Charles Dickens was fierce about how he wanted his books performed and always knew how to wring every possible drop of drama from a scene. He created stories with dramatic monthly cliffhangers and loved to see his words reducing audiences to quivering wrecks. Many of the millions of people who love the words, stories and characters created by Charles Dickens first encountered them from the mouth of a furry blue Muppet; and it is very likely that Dickens would have wholeheartedly approved.”
Showtime! is part of the 100th birthday celebrations of the Museum at 48 Doughty Street, the only surviving London house in which Charles Dickens lived and the place where he wrote the stories that made him an international superstar. In 1837, when Dickens moved into the home with his growing family, he was a budding author; by the time the family left, Dickens was world famous, on the back of a trio of wildly successful novels written there: The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby. The Museum holds the world’s most comprehensive collection of material related to Dickens.
The Museum was awarded £44,400 by The National Lottery Heritage Fund and additional funding from The Dickens Fellowship and The Circles of Art in support of Showtime! as well as a bespoke new community and learning programme, complementing the exhibition.
EXHIBITION INFORMATION
Showtime! at The Charles Dickens Museum, 48-49 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LX.
Dates: 23 July 2025 – 18 January 2026. Book tickets here.
Opening hours: 10am to 5pm, Wednesday – Sunday (closed Mondays and Tuesdays)
More information: www.dickensmuseum.com 020 7405 2127 [email protected]
See more exhibition shots by Penny Dampier on our Instagram feed.
