Unpublished pen, ink and watercolour sketches by Nathaniel Powell, Dickens’s neighbour in Tavistock Square, go on display at the Charles Dickens Museum in London from Sunday, running until 21 September 2025. The drawings show Charles Dickens and his theatre company in rehearsals for stage works including Mr Nightingale’s Diary and The Frozen Deep, with portraits of Mark Lemon, Mamie Dickens and Wilkie Collins.

Powell recalled that he was invited to attend performances at the Dickens home and noted rough sketches of the cast in his 1857 sketchbook. One piece will enter the museum’s Showtime! exhibition, which runs to January 2026, while the remaining sketches will be displayed in the study where Dickens wrote Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and The Pickwick Papers.

The sketches were acquired with support from the Art Fund, Arts Council England/V&A Purchase Grant Fund and the Wilkie Collins Society. Dickens and his family moved to Tavistock House in 1851, where he lived for nine years and wrote Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities. The Charles Dickens Museum is the only surviving Dickens home in London.