Extra/Ordinary Women exhibition explores the women in Charles Dickens’s life and writing
Walking through the doors of London’s Charles Dickens Museum is always a special moment. This handsome, tall London townhouse – middle class by Victorian standards but practically palatial to visitors today – was the crucible in which a young, ascending Charles Dickens wrote himself into international superstardom.
It is here that The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby spilled from his pen. And it is here, as the new exhibition Extra/Ordinary Women compellingly demonstrates, that Dickens lived in constant proximity to the intelligent and talented women who shaped his imagination, his domestic life and his enduring theatricality.
The Extra/Ordinary Women exhibition offers insights to many of these women. His wife, Catherine Dickens, who also wrote within these walls. His sister, Mary Hogarth, whose sudden death here devastated him. His sister-in-law, housekeeper and adviser Georgina Hogarth, who remained his rock for the rest of his life.
Victorian culture, which was suspicious of women who moved in theatrical, artistic or public spheres, left deep traces on Dickens’s portrayals of women. In his writing, Dickens either sanitised his female characters, like the “saintly” Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) or the “innocent” Rose Maylie in Oliver Twist (1838); or he reformed them, like the “fallen” women, Martha Endell and Little Em’ly in David Copperfield (1850). He gave these characters emotional clarity and symbolic weight that belies the more complex real-world inspirations.
The exhibition shows that Mary Hogarth, for instance, is scattered through Dickens’s fiction in the form of saintly young women whose deaths confer moral meaning. Dickens’s close friend Angela Burdett‑Coutts – a philanthropist and powerful progressive – was softened into Agnes Wickfield, a gentle moral influence in David Copperfield.
Dickens the performer
Looking around the exhibition, I found myself thinking about performance. Not just the performances of the women around him, but Dickens’s own lifelong, desperate theatricality.
It has always seemed obvious to me, as a performer of Dickens’s work, that he wrote with an actor’s mind. My own performed reading of A Christmas Carol taught me that his prose demands embodiment: the regretful cadences of Scrooge’s former fiancée Belle, the anguish of Bob Cratchit, the vocal changes that illustrate the transformative journey of Scrooge himself. These characters were not merely written to be read, they were written to be heard.
The deputy director of the museum, Emma Harper, informed me that while writing, Dickens would break from his desk to perform the characters he was developing in the mirror. He also performed domestic dramas for his children, founded amateur dramatic troupes and he threw himself into public readings so intensely that doctors monitored his pulse before and after each performance. He made himself physically ill with the sheer force of his acting. This is not a writer who happened also to perform. This is a performer who happened also to write.
And the women around him were, in many ways, part of that theatrical and artistic world. His daughters are good examples. Mamie Dickens loved performing, and Katey Perugini, an artist of real talent, appears in the exhibition through in a newly displayed painting that mimics her own painting style. The exhibition also reminds us that Ellen Ternan – Dickens’s longtime mistress – came from a theatrical family.
All of this becomes shockingly vivid with the exhibition’s centrepiece: the newly revealed, previously unpublished letter to the French opera singer Pauline Viardot. It is, in many ways, a perfect artefact, because it shows Dickens in full, contradictory colour.
Here is the great novelist, in Paris for his triumphant theatrical readings, writing with unabashed admiration to a woman whose artistry moved him to tears. But here is also Dickens the flirt – offering her an invitation to dine and promising tickets to his next reading.
Dickens wrote the letter while en route to see his mistress, Ternan, in Geneva. “I am going to Geneva tomorrow night, but will be back in seven days,” he says breezily, attempting to schedule dinner with Viardot for the following week.
The exhibition also includes a letter from Viardot to Dickens’s biographer, where she recalls Dickens “raining tears” during her performance of Orphée. And it reveals something about Dickens that the exhibition continually circles back to: he existed in a self-made world of performance, admiration, emotional excess and artistic intoxication. He was drawn to women who were brilliant, expressive and creative, because they belonged to that same world of heightened feeling and dramatic possibility.
This is what makes Extra/Ordinary Women so compelling: it reframes Dickens not only through the women he knew, but through the theatrical culture they collectively inhabited. Stepping outside, I felt his familiar voice linger, now joined by the sense that the women behind the scenes were finally stepping into the light – something the dramatist in Dickens might have appreciated.
Extra/Ordinary Women is at the Charles Dickens Museum in London until September 6
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Oliver Bray does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.