Exhibition Talk - Caroline Malcolm Boulton on Dickens's women

Date: Thursday 10 September 2026
Time: 4.00pm (UK time).
Duration: Approximately 1 hour.

Location: 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 online talk is free to attend but tickets must be booked in advance.

Click here to book a VIRTUAL ticket.

As an independent charity we welcome any donation supporting the future work of the Charles Dickens Museum. Add this to your booking. 

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

Please note that all event tickets are non-refundable.

Caroline Malcolm Boulton, also known as The Scribbler CMB, is a writer and arts journalist who uses the arts to inspire education and empowerment across all areas of society. She is also a board member for the Blank Canvas Trust and an Associate Lecturer with the Scottish Arts & Education Collective.

In this talk Caroline will explore whether Dickens's female characters are 'mad, bad, or too good to be true'. How far does this claim hold up? Caroline will look at characters who seem to fall into each of these categories and whether they are indeed these dramatic caricatures, or are they emblematic of women in the wider Victorian society? Do they also perhaps reflect Dickens’ own experience and exploitations of women?

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.

Kirsty Parsons, curator at the Charles Dickens Museum, said, “Extra/Ordinary Women turns the spotlight towards a whole host of charismatic women who usually remain in the shadow of Charles Dickens. It reveals new sides to people who are often only mentioned in passing or seen through the prism of Dickens’s own views. We are pleased to be telling their fascinating stories here, in the home and neighbourhood which many of them knew so well.”   

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.