Past Events
Lucinda will be at the Charles Dickens Museum to speak about Fanny Burnett. Frances ‘Fanny’ Dickens was the oldest child in the Dickens family and adored by her younger brother, Charles. As children they did everything together, until 1823, when Fanny was accepted as a boarding pupil at the Royal Academy of Music to train as a musician. The siblings remained close throughout their lives, with Charles very proud of his sister’s achievements. Fanny also inspired several characters in her brother’s novels. Come and hear Fanny’s great great great great granddaughter, Lucinda Hawksley, talk about this unfairly forgotten Victorian singer.
There will be the opportunity for a short Q+A following the talk.
Join author, art historian and broadcaster Lucinda Hawksley for a fascinating journey into the motivations behind her writing, as part of the WEA’s Purpose to Pen series.
Lucinda specialises in 19th? and early?20th?century art, literature and social history. An award?winning travel writer and environmental advocate, she is also the great?great?great granddaughter of Charles and Catherine Dickens. Her books include The Mystery of Princess Louise, Lizzie Siddal, March, Women, March and Charles Dickens and His Circle.
In this event, Lucinda will discuss the intersections of biography, history and creativity – and why she continues to write about the people and stories that shaped our world.
Lucinda Hawksley is an author, historian, broadcaster and travel writer.
She has been in conversations with Rhys Griff Jones, Miriam Margoles and various other well known personalities. She appears at the Dickens festivals, speaks at book events and has written about a fascinating variety of things…
She has appeared on the One Show as well as on Songs of Praise, and several other television shows. This is a one-off opportunity to hear a fascinating evening of conversation, talk and questions over a complimentary glass of wine. The bar will be open for your second glass!
119th Annual Conference & Annual General Meeting: Dickens, Fairytales & Fantasy.
Keynote Lecture by Lucinda Dickens Hawksley: Princess Alexandra (Alix) and her connection to the wider Dickens circle.
2pm – 3pm on Thursday 6 August, 2026.
Lucinda will be 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.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was made up of seven precocious, talented and astonishingly forward-thinking young men who changed the face of 19th-century art and artistic society. They included in their number a Beethoven-style child genius; a romantic Italian obsessed with a long-dead medieval poet; a fervent traveller who spent years in obscure areas of the Middle East and whose fervour for painting by moonlight led his neighbours to believe him insane; and a young man who staked everything he had on the Australian goldrush. Their lives were as extraordinary as their art and the circle in which they moved makes for a truly exciting story.
Kvinderne i Dickens’ romaner
Charles Dickens is often criticized for writing stereotypical and submissive female characters, yet many of his female figures were anything but that.
In this lecture, author and art historian Lucinda Dickens Hawksley, Charles Dickens’ great-great-granddaughter, sheds new light on the often overlooked female characters in his novels. She explores women who were independent, had careers, or broke with the norms of the time regarding how a woman was expected to behave.
A fascinating look at 19th-century Great Britain and the strong women Dickens both knew and wrote about.
NB: The lecture will be held in English.
Author, lecturer, and Charles Dickens expert Lucinda Hawksley on the diverse, powerful and fascinating women in the works of Dickens.
Charles Dickens is often accused of writing only unbelievably compliant and domesticated women in his novels, but many of his female characters have very strong personalities and fascinating lives, reflecting the strong and interesting women Dickens knew.
Lucinda Hawksley is an author, art historian, broadcaster, lecturer, and an expert on the writings and the life of Charles Dickens, of whom Hawksley is also a descendant, being the great-great-great-granddaughter of the celebrated author.
The event is in English.
Lucinda will be at the Charles Dickens Museum to speak about Dickens’s daughter, Mamie Dickens. Mamie was the second of Charles and Catherine Dickens’s children. Always the dutiful daughter, her nickname within the family was “mild Gloster”. When her parents separated, Mamie became her father’s housekeeper and something of a local celebrity in Kent. After Dickens’s death, however, everything changed. Mamie left her family, moved to Manchester and lived a scandalous new life, which is still shrouded in secrecy. In this talk, her great-great-great granddaughter Lucinda Hawksley will look at the life of the lesser-known Dickens daughter.
There will be the opportunity for a short Q+A following the talk.