Playbill for The Cricket on the Hearth, 1846
Playbills — posters advertising theatre productions — helped spread the news of early adaptations of Dickens’s works. One of the stories most adapted within Dickens’s lifetime was the now lesser-known work, The Cricket on the Hearth. These early adaptations enhanced Dickens’s popularity even if productions sometimes took liberties with plot, creating their own endings before Dickens had released his, to his combined delight and frustration. Before 1840, The Pickwick Papers (1837), Oliver Twist (1837) and Nicholas Nickleby (1838) had been staged 60 times. By 1850, Dickens had been dramatised in 240 different productions, securing his place on the world stage.
Playbill for The Cricket on the Hearth, Theatre Royal, Lyceum, 1846
DH792 © Charles Dickens Museum