Dickens Playbills and Programmes
It was a pleasure on a recent visit to London to take in ‘Showtime’ at the Charles Dickens Museum: a small but fascinating exhibition (open until 18 January 2026) with some very rare playbills, including several from an important private collection purchased with the assistance of the National Heritage Arts Fund and other major funding bodies (https://dickensmuseum.com/blogs/news/acquisition-of-major-private-collection-of-rare-and-original-dickens-material-announced). These include private performances of operas and plays at home by Charles Dickens, his family and friends (such as the opera Clari (https://www.collections.dickensmuseum.com/object-dh1048--1971-1) and American dramatisations of Dickens’s novels. Other items on display include tickets, theatre tokens, miniature theatre sheets, handbills of Dickens’s own readings, and posters and programmes of more recent productions, such as blockbuster musicals in London and New York. It is fascinating to realise that Dickens had no jurisdiction over interpretations of his novels as plays. One exhibit (top right of the image above) is for a production of The Old Curiosity Shop at the Theatre Royal, Adelphi in 1840 (https://www.collections.dickensmuseum.com/object-dh785--2019-5-206) with an ending supplied by Edward Stirling before Dickens’s own ending was even published. The caption tells us that Dickens wrote of it: ‘The thing might be better than I expect, but I have no faith in it at all’.
Dickens playbills always take me back to my early days in the John Johnson Collection. In the mid 1980s, before digitisation, H. Philip Bolton was a regular and welcome summer visitor, trawling through nearly every box of playbills in order to write his bibliography Dickens Dramatized (Mansell, 1987) followed by Scott Dramatized. He enjoyed doing so, I am sure. Now, these same playbills and programmes can be located by a few clicks of the mouse through ProQuest’s The John Johnson Collection: an archive of printed ephemera, free to all in the UK:
https://www.proquest.com/johnjohnson/geoauth
together with most of the Entertainment, Advertising, Popular Prints, Booktrade and Crime sections of the John Johnson Collection.
A rare Guernsey playbill for Joe (based on Bleak House. Bodleian Libraries: John Johnson Collection: Provincial Playbills: Eastbourne – Guernsey (84) https://www.proquest.com/johnjohnson/pamphlets-ephemeral-works/joe-shelfmark-provincial-playbills-box-eastbourne/docview/2823560029/sem-2?accountid=142537
There are many other Dickens playbills online too, including those of the Free Library of Philadelphia, the V&A Enthoven Collection, the University of Kent Charles Dickens Theatre Collection and the Online Archive of California. Scholars can access huge numbers of items remotely and create their own virtual collections for research purposes. The proliferation of digital projects testifies to the growing importance attached to ephemera by institutions and historians. I really enjoy being an ‘armchair ephemerist, discovering collections or items new to me. Never before have we had access to so much ephemeral material.
But, of course, there is no substitute for seeing the real thing. Exhibitions and museum displays play an important role in bringing ephemera before the public, either as the main focus (such as the playbills, programmes, posters, etc in ‘Showtime’) or as part of a wider story, such as women’s suffrage or trade unionism. And I admit to liking the prestige conferred on single items of ephemera in exhibitions. Mounted and framed, or carefully positioned in display cases, ephemera are taking their rightful place in the canon of historical documents.
We are happy to publicise exhibitions of or including ephemera in our Ephemera Events page: https://ephemera-society.org.uk/ephemera-events/ Please let know of any we have missed.