Miriam Margolyes celebrates Dickens on stage and screen

Showtime! at The Dickens Museum in Doughty Street also celebrates the author’s love of acting, theatre, and performing public readings of his novels.

The Harry Potter actor is a patron of the Bloomsbury museum and said: “If I could have one wish in the world it would be to be in the audience at a Dickens reading.”

Miriam Margolyes is a patron of the Dickens Museum where the author lived when he wrote The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist. (Image: The Dickens Museum) She added: “Dickens 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.”

The author launched his literary career while living in the house.

Margolyes is co-writer and star of Dickens’ Women – in which she played multiple characters, including Little Nell, Miss Havisham, Mrs Gamp and Mrs Micawber, and is about to head up to the Edinburgh Festival to perform Margolyes & Dickens: More Best Bits.

Miriam Margolyes is about to head up to the Edinburgh Festival to perform a show about Dickens. (Image: Charles Dickens Museum) She was joined at the launch by Lucinda Dickens Hawksley, writer and great-great-great granddaughter of Charles Dickens, and museum director Frankie Kubicki.

Margolyes said her own love of theatre was inspired by a trip to the panto as a child and said of performing: “The concept of ‘pretend’ is how we develop our imagination.

“Performance is something deep in the psyche of human beings.”

She read extracts from Dickens’ letters, including one in which he gives himself a glowing review after performing on stage in Every Man in His Humour by Ben Jonson.

She also visited the drawing room, where Dickens, his wife Catherine and their children used to perform plays.

Actor, writer 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 five-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 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.

“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 Dickens Museum is at 48, Doughty Street, Bloomsbury. Showtime! runs until January 18, 2026.