A Dickens Christmas

Charles Dickens, long an avid theatre-goer and performer in amateur theatricals, gave his first public reading of A Christmas Carol in 1853. The charismatic author is said to have employed a different voice, a different style, for each of his characters, and he regularly appeared before audiences for the next sixteen years, charming audiences and critics alike. In 1867-68, Dickens brought his reading tour to the United States. This holiday season, the Library is celebrating with a special installation featuring Dickens’s heavily annotated prompt-copies—which he used in his performances—of A Christmas Carol and other holiday books, including The Chimes and The Cricket on the Hearth, together with original photographs, first editions, and ephemera.

This display is organized by The New York Public Library and curated by Carolyn Vega, Curator of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature.

The Berg Collection is one of the world’s most celebrated research collections of English and American literature. It contains some 35,000 printed volumes, pamphlets, and broadsides, and 2,000 linear feet of literary archives and manuscripts, representing the work of more than 400 authors. The Berg’s most extensive manuscript holdings date from the period 1820–1970, particularly in collections related to Modernism and the Bloomsbury Group; the Irish Literary Renaissance; the Beats; and New York School poetry; and the countercultural poets of New York’s Lower East Side (1960–1980). 

Explore the Charles Dickens Collection of Papers in our Digital Collection. 

Flip through Charles Dickens' personal copy of A Christmas Carol, annotated with his own performance and reading notes.