Charles Dickens’s ‘sliding doors’ moment: how a cold turned an aspiring thespian into a writer

The exhibition explores 200 years of performances of Dickens’s stories through items including letters, posters and playbills. Photograph: Charles Dickens Museum

As 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.