Exhibition Talk - Lucinda Dickens Hawksley on Anny Thackeray

Date: Thursday 30 July 2026
Time: 12.30pm (UK time).
Duration: Approximately 1 hour.

Location: Choose either

• Attend onsite at 49 Doughty Street, London (limited capacity) 
• Attend virtually on Zoom. Register to receive joining instructions.

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 hybrid talk is free to attend onsite or online but tickets must be booked in advance.

Click here to book an ONSITE ticket.

Click here to book a VIRTUAL ticket.

As an independent charity we welcome any donation supporting the future work of the Charles Dickens Museum. Click here to donate.

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

Please note that all event tickets are non-refundable.

Lucinda Dickens Hawksley is the great-great-great granddaughter of Charles and Catherine Dickens. She is an historian, author and broadcaster having published titles such as Charles Dickens and his Circle, Dickens's Artistic Daughter: The Life and Loves of Katey Dickens, and Letters of Great Women. She is patron of the Charles Dickens Museum and President of the Dickens Fellowship.

On Thursday 30 July 2026 Lucinda will be joining us at the Charles Dickens Museum to speak about Anny Thackeray. When researching her biography of Dickens’s artist daughter, Katey, Lucinda Hawksley became fascinated by Anny Thackeray, a close friend of the Dickens girls. Anny was the older daughter of the novelist William Thackeray and she became a famous novelist in her own right. In her own time, she was celebrated for her writing, like so many women, however, her achievements have since been forgotten by history. Come along on 30 July and find out all about the famous Victorian writer you’ve probably never heard of! Anny was a brilliant and fascinating woman, whose story deserves to be much better known.

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.