Extra/Ordinary Women

Drawing on the world’s most comprehensive collection of historic Dickens material, an exhibition celebraing the real women who influenced Dickens and reveal the clues which help match several of them to their fictional counterparts.

Highlights include Catherine Dickens’s cookbook, not only reminding us of her important role as a society hostess, helping to establish Dickens’s ‘celebrity’ but also that she was a published author in her own right. Also on display is a draft preface to an 1857 manual for educating working class children with edits in Dickens’s own hand.