A Woodblock Illustration for Dickens’s Cheap Edition

Dickens understood the importance of illustrations in a book and found inventive ways to include them in editions of his novels. In this video, join Curator Louisa Price as she shows you a woodblock of John Leech’s famous illustration, ‘Mr. Fezziwig’s Ball’ – the only illustration to be used in Dickens’s 1852 cheap edition of his Christmas stories.

This video is the third in a series of six videos celebrating our special exhibition, Beautiful Books: Dickens and the Business of Christmas. The first video can be found here and the second here.

Louisa Price has been Curator at the Charles Dickens Museum, London since 2014. She specialises in nineteenth and twentieth century social history collections. Prior to the Dickens Museum she worked at The Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, The Museum of The Home and the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum.