The best of times...

The great novelist died 150 years ago, on 9th June 1870, aged 58. Four writers tell Simon Hemelryk their favourite Dickens moment

- Simon Hemelryk

Simon Callow

Actor, author of Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World and creator of the one-man show The Mystery of Charles Dickens

It made my young, would-be actor heart beat much faster when I first read the section in Nicholas Nickleby where Nicholas and his friend Smike join Vincent Crummle’s touring company. The pair meet him in a Portsmouth inn, having come to the town to look for work as sailors. But Crummle, this improbable figure with a huge rumbling voice, convinces them they should take to the stage instead.

‘There’s genteel comedy in your walk and manner, juvenile tragedy in your eye,’ he tells Nicholas. ‘You’ll do as well as if you had thought of nothing else but the lamps, from your birth downwards.’

Dickens’s subsequent description of life in Crummle’s touring company is an enchanting introduction to the theatre.

There are fabulous characters: the child phenomenon, who’s actually about 20, and Folair, who’s unmistakably a bitchy queen – not unknown in acting. There’s a real sense of the magic, absurdity and tawdry glamour of the profession. And the thrill of putting on a show, exciting people and then moving on to the next place.

When I was a child with chickenpox, scratching all over, my grandmother gave me my first Dickens, Pickwick Papers. I never scratched again.

Dickens’s youthful, carnivalesque world of grotesques was wonderful to discover as a young person.