Exhibition Talk - Christine Skelton on Georgina Hogarth

Date: Thursday 25 June 2026
Time: 12.30pm (UK time).
Duration: Approximately 1 hour.

Location: Live online on Zoom. To watch this talk 'on demand' simply book a virtual ticket and you'll get the link sent to you as soon as its ready. 

This virtual talk is free to attend but tickets must be booked in advance.

Click here to book a VIRTUAL ticket.

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Please note that all event tickets are non-refundable.

Professor Christine Skelton is Emeritus Professor of Gender Education in the School of Education, University of Birmingham, and author of Charles Dickens and Georgina Hogarth: A curious and enduring relationship.

Join us at the Charles Dickens Museum on Thursday 25 June 2026 to delve into the themes of our current exhibition 'Extra/Ordinary Women'. Join Professor Skelton as she delves into the life of Dickens's ‘best and truest friend’ Georgina Hogarth. Dickens trusted her to guard his personal reputation after his death by making her one of the executors of his will – much to Georgina’s horror! She initially felt that she was not up to the task and it was to take her several years after her grief over Dickens’s death subsided that Georgina started to exercise her powers. Georgina’s first biographer coined the phrase ‘Guardian of the Beloved Memory’ to describe how she closely monitored and then squashed any attempts to besmirch his name.  It is largely thanks to Georgina that any knowledge about Dickens’s relationship with Ellen Ternan remained hidden for so long. What started for Georgina as a flattering, but unwelcome, bequest turned into a purpose which fulfilled her life for 47 years

There will be the opportunity for a short Q+A following the talk.

What’s the Extra/Ordinary Women exhibition about?

Like many great writers, Dickens wrote what he knew and, as a result, has produced some of the greatest stories in the English language. But there were many extraordinary women in Dickens’s life and yet, somehow, they never made it from real life onto the page. The female characters that he created don’t reveal the relationships he had with independent-minded, characterful women, as Dickens tended to play with and reinforce Victorian stereotypes. This exhibition will highlight these differences between the extraordinary women he knew and the ordinary and idealised women he wrote. It will give the real-life women a voice beyond Dickens’s pen.

At 48 Doughty Street, Charles Dickens (1812-1870) wrote the stories which made him an international superstar. When Dickens and his young family moved into the house in the 1830s, he was a budding author, unknown to most, but by the time the family left, Dickens was world famous, having written a trio of wildly successful novels - The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby – in his study at home. This Victorian literary house is now the Charles Dickens Museum. Purchase a museum admission ticket to explore the historic house and special exhibition.