Charles Dickens: Life and Legacy

The National Portrait Gallery (London, United Kingdom) celebrates the bicentenary of the birth of the nineteenth-century writer, Charles Dickens, with a new display that is part of Dickens 2012, the international campaign to mark the 200th anniversary of the writer's birth. Portraits of the author, his family and influential contemporaries chart the progress of his life and examine the enduring legacy of the characters he created.
 
The fifteen works in this case display include photographs, drawings and engravings ranging from the early period of the writer’s career to posthumous images of his characters showing the longevity of his literary creations. The earliest portrait on display is a romantic portrait in oils of Dickens, aged 26, by Daniel Maclise, showing the writer enjoying his first taste of fame. Two photographs by Herbert Watkins in 1858 mark the celebrity Dickens had obtained by the mid-nineteenth century as both a writer and as a public reader of his works.

Dickens is also shown alongside a network of friends, including the artists Clarkson Stanfield and Augustus Leopald Egg, the novelist Wilkie Collins and Mark Lemon, Punch's first editor. In addition, Dickens' visits to America are marked in the display by portraits of the poets Edgar Allan Poe, with whom he had a cursory encounter, and Henry Longfellow, who became a lasting friend.
 
Date: until April 22.
Location: National Portrait Gallery, St Martin’s Place, London, WC2H 0HE. United Kingdom.
Opening hours Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Saturday, Sunday from 10am to 6pm.

See some of the portraits in the following slideshow: