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Dickens and the stage

Popular theatre exercised a great influence on Dickens throughout his life. As a child he was coached by his father to perform comic poems and songs and was presented with a toy theatre by his cousin. As a young man, Dickens seriously considered a career on the stage before settling for journalism. He paid nightly visits to the theatre to see comic actors such as the great Charles Matthews, whose sharp observations of character and oddity influenced Dickens's writings and public readings. Had he become an actor, there seems little doubt he would have risen to the top of the profession. His performances in The Frozen Deep (1857) won praise from Thackeray and Queen Victoria, who considered his acting 'beyond all praise and not to be surpassed'.

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Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi
Charles Dickens; ill. by George Cruikshank
London: R. Bentley, 1838.
[S.L.] I [Dickens – 1838]

In 1819 and 1820 the young Dickens was taken by his father John to London to see the great clown Joey Grimaldi performing in pantomime at Sadler’s Wells. Dickens would later recall himself clapping with ‘great precocity’ on these occasions. In 1837 Dickens was persuaded by the publisher Richard Bentley to edit Grimaldi’s memoirs, and his ‘introductory chapter’ evocatively captures his childhood joy at attending pantomimes with their ‘ten thousand million delights’.

Joe Grimaldi
J. Harris after S. De Wilde
London: R. Bentley, 1846
Courtesy of Prof. Michael Slater

The costume worn by Grimaldi can be seen in the Dickens exhibition at the Museum of London.

The Uncommercial Traveller
Charles Dickens
London: Chapman & Hall, [187-]
[S.L.] I [Dickens – 1861]

Dickens’s older cousin, George Lamert, fostered the youthful Charles’s attraction to live theatre with trips to Rochester Theatre Royal. This collection of essays, originally written for the weekly journal All The Year Round, includes ‘Dullborough Town’ in which Dickens imagines returning to the town he knew so well as a child, ‘Dullborough’ being Rochester in Kent. It includes a delightful passage on watching performances of Shakespeare’s Richard the Third and Macbeth in which Dickens celebrates the theatre’s joyous combination of the world of the imagination and the real world of makeshift props and actors playing multiple parts.