Exhibition: Restless Shadow: Dickens the Campaigner

Charles Dickens was a novelist who addressed social ills in his fiction. He was also a journalist and activist who boldly and imaginatively campaigned to improve the lives of the most desperate and overlooked in Victorian society.

The exhibition Restless Shadow explores a largely unknown and under-rated body of Dickens’s work that speaks plainly to social justice with energy and relevance—both then and now. It reveals his keen interest in ‘street level’ problems along with other Victorian reformers such as Florence Nightingale and Angela Burdett-Coutts. It shows the practical, hands-on solutions which flowed from his campaigns.

Dickens was especially powerful in pioneering new forms of investigative reporting and satirical exposé. As a young journalist and shorthand-writer with the pen-name ‘Boz’, he honed a peerless style of urban description, combining humour, pathos and a heightened kind of graphic realism. In his artistic maturity as a journalist, editor and speech-maker, Dickens drew the attention of a huge and diverse international readership to an astonishingly broad range of campaigns.