An exhibition explores the authors’ love of theatre, highlighting the dramatic impact of his works
A
s a sliding doors moment, it leads to arguably one of the greatest “what if?” questions in literary history. Passionate about the theatre, Charles Dickens, then just 20, wrote to the famous Covent Garden theatre actor-manager George Bartley seeking an audition, saying he believed he “had a strong perception of character and oddity, and a natural power of reproducing in my own person what I observed in others”.
Bartley responded saying they were producing “the Hunchback” and arranging an appointment. Dickens planned to take his sister, Fanny, to accompany him singing on the piano.
Then Dickens fell ill “with a terrible bad cold” and missed the audition. By the time the next season came around he had embarked on the parliamentary reporter job that would firmly set him on his path to novelist. Would the world have been deprived of his literary canon but for the timing of that cold?
