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.

Then Dickens fell ill “with a terrible bad cold” and missed the audition. By the time the next season came around he had embarked on the parliamentary reporter job that would firmly set him on his path to novelist. Would the world have been deprived of his literary canon but for the timing of that cold?

Yet Dickens never abandoned his love of theatre, which is examined in detail in a new exhibition, “Showtime!”, opening on 23 July at the Charles Dickens Museum in London, highlighting his fondness of drama and the dramatic impact of his works.

It was evident in how he constructed stories, published as weekly serials with a cliffhanger.

In public readings he would physically act out episodes on tours around Britain and America. His most famous one, of the gruesome murder of Nancy by Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist, was so intense it is said it contributed to his death, aged 58, in 1870.

The dramatic quality of his stories has lent them easily to innumerable adaptations over two centuries, from those brazenly pirated by the Victorian dramatist Edward Stirling at the Adelphi in London during Dickens’s lifetime to The Muppets Christmas Carol in 1992.

The actor Simon Callow, who has played many Dickensian characters on stage and screen, said: “Performing was central to Dickens’s life from a very early age. His father used to take him as a five-year-old to the local pub where he would recite and sing.

“Perhaps the pivotal moment of his life was his cancellation because of illness of an audition with the greatest actor-manager of his day. Instead he took a job as a parliamentary reporter and then the course of his life was set.”

But Dickens never stopped writing, directing and performing plays, said Callow, a patron of the museum. “All this came to a head in the public readings, which he performed for massive and astounded audiences on both sides of the Atlantic.”

One such astounded spectator was Mark Twain, who wrote of one Dickens reading of a “spry, (if I may say it,) thin-legged old gentleman, gotten up regardless of expense, especially as to shirt-front and diamonds … the very Dickens came! He did not emerge upon the stage – that is rather too deliberate a word – he strode.”

Emma Harper, the exhibition’s curator, said: “I don’t think many are aware of the extent of Dickens’s theatricality. And particularly that ‘sliding doors’ moment. I don’t know had he gone into acting as his main career whether writing would have been that side hustle for him. It’s a great ‘what if?’.”

Dickens wrote to his friend John Forster of the missed audition: “See how near I may have been, to another sort of life.” He said he still thought of the theatre. “I begin to be once more of opinion that nature intended me for the Lessee of a National Theatre – and that pen ink and paper have spoiled a (Theatre) Manager.”

Harper said: “His drama comes through. We have his reading copies where he is taking his own work, he’s editing it, he’s striking through on the book, glueing pages together, highlighting, writing in his own stage directions to make it as dramatic as possible.”

He said Dickens’s daughter Mamie, telling of watching him work, “describes how he jumps up from his desk, goes towards the nearest mirror and he acts out what he’s just written; he does all the faces, the voices and then he rushes back to the desk to write it back down again, so to check that his description matches what he wants his audience to experience.”

The exhibition, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, explores 200 years of performances of Dickens’s stories, from his own edited reading copies to letters, posters, playbills, programmes, photographs and props. Yes, and even including from the Muppets. “Can’t do this without the Muppets!” said Harper.

• Showtime! is on 23 July 2025 – 18 January 2026 at the Charles Dickens Museum at 48 Doughty Street, Holborn, London.