Miriam Margolyes Launches New Showtime! Exhibition at Charles Dickens Museum

Patron of the Charles Dickens Museum Miriam Margolyes has officially opened its new exhibition Showtime! revealing the author's love of performing and two centuries of productions of his stories for theatre, film, television, 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.

Margolyes 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.

“If I could have one wish in the world it would be to be in the audience at a Dickens reading," said Margolyes. "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.”

During the launch, she gave readings includings Dickens’s own article from 1853 in which he recounts being separated from his family in London as a child,and finding himself in a theatre, 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.

Highlights from the exhibition include:

• 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 Dickens free entry to performances at Her Majesty's Theatre, Haymarket
• the silver cup awarded to Dickens by fellow theatre company members in Montreal

Showtime! runs until January 18, 2026, and 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.