Adult Creative Writing Workshops

Choose from listed dates (subject to availability):

Date: Saturday 4 July 2026
Time: 11.30 am.

Date: Sunday 20 September 2026
Time: 2.00 pm.

Date: Wednesday 23 September 2026
Time: 6.30 pm.

Duration: 2 hours.

Location: 49 Doughty Street, London

Eligibility: The workshop content is designed for adults therefore tickets are restricted to persons aged 18+.

Cost: Free of charge. 

Cancellation: If you book a ticket and subsequently can no longer make it please advise cancellation in advance so someone else can participate.

Should you have any difficulties or questions, please email the Events team; events@dickensmuseum.com.

Join creative writer Rosa Chalfen to explore the lives of some of the extraordinary women who inspired Charles Dickens, one of the world’s greatest writers. Using the Charles Dickens Museum’s collection as stimulus, Rosa will introduce you to some writing techniques with fun, creative prompts. Delve into the stories of the women that Dickens knew, and the ones he created, and put pen to paper to imagine their lives in the house where Dickens wrote Oliver Twist.

No prior experience needed.

Pen, notebook and tea/coffee provided

Funded by the University of Hertfordshire Co-Production Award

Rosa Chalfen is a writer from London. She studied English at the University of Oxford and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. She has run creative writing workshops at heritage sites in Norfolk and London and her work has been shortlisted for the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize.

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.