Unpublished sketches that bring Charles Dickens’ “world and character to life” have gone on display for the first time.
A one-off set of pen, ink and watercolour sketches of the English playwright can be seen at the Charles Dickens Museum in London from Sunday until September 21.
The sketches show Dickens and his theatre company in the midst of rehearsals for stage productions including Dickens’ Mr Nightingale’s Diary and The Frozen Deep.
They also depict his friend, the former editor of Punch magazine, Mark Lemon, his eldest daughter Mamie Dickens, and Victorian playwright and novelist Wilkie Collins, who is best known for writing The Woman In White and for collaborating with Dickens to write the play The Frozen Deep.
The informal sketches, newly acquired by the museum, were made in 1855 and 1857 by Nathaniel Powell, Dickens’ next-door neighbour in Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury, London.
Powell recalled the time he was invited next door to make the sketches and wrote: “We were invited by Mr and Mrs Dickens to attend theatrical performances at their house. They were intensely interesting on account of the cast, the staging and the audiences.
“The most important piece was The Frozen Deep in which Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Mark Lemon took parts. You will find rough sketches of the characters in my 1857 sketchbook.”
One sketch will join the museum’s current exhibition Showtime!, which runs until January 2026, and the remaining sketches will be on display in the study where Dickens wrote Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and The Pickwick Papers.
Frankie Kubicki, director of the Charles Dickens Museum, said: “Far removed from the many polished images of Dickens in performance, these are the only known immediate ‘snapshots’ of Dickens in rehearsal, capturing moments of staging, costuming and performing unrecorded elsewhere.
“This is a window on to one of the enduring passions of Charles Dickens’s life – performing.
“These vivid sketches give us an enticing and intimate glimpse of the productions staged by Dickens and the friends and family within his theatre group.
“They are full of the frenetic energy for which Dickens was renowned and bring Dickens’s world and character to life in a way that we haven’t quite seen before.
“We are grateful to Art Fund and Arts Council England/V&A Purchase Grant Fund for their support underpinning this acquisition.”
Dickens and his family moved into Tavistock House, now the Charles Dickens Museum, in 1851 and lived there for nine years.
There he wrote several of his most celebrated novels including Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit and A Tale Of Two Cities.
The Charles Dickens Museum is the only house in which Dickens lived in London that survives.
The unseen sketches were acquired by the museum at auction with support from the Art Fund, Arts Council England/V&A Purchase Grant Fund, and the Wilkie Collins Society.
