Special Festive Christmas Displays at Charles Dickens Museum

Christmas celebrations are already underway at the Charles Dickens Museum in London which is the home in which Dickens himself and his family celebrated yuletide.

Over the festive period an extension of the current Showtime! exhibition will be on view in Dickens’s study, exploring Dickens’s Christmas reading tours during which he performed the ghost stories The Chimes and The Haunted Man, as well as A Christmas Carol which was published on December 19, 1843, and sold out by Christmas Eve.

Dickens’s reading copies, full of his handwritten notes, scene-cutting and stage directions feature alongside a first edition of A Christmas Carol and a manuscript extract of Dickens’s fourth Christmas story The Battle of Life which he wrote in Paris over Christmas 1846.

Other highlights include actor James Swanton’s one-man Christmas performances of A Christmas Carol, The Haunted Man, The Signal-Man and The Trial for Murder.

There will be a special Christmas Eve celebration with Victorian style decorations, music, and live events, and a free mince pie and mulled wine/festive soft drink fo every guest receives. A Christmas Carol will be screened all day and every visitor who books a Christmas Eve ticket in advance will have a chance of winning a Dickensian Christmas bumper prize, including a facsimile first edition of A Christmas Carol, Dickens & Christmas by Lucinda Dickens Hawksley and a Bah Humbug! Christmas mug.