Inspired to be an actor by a performance of
Nicholas Nickleby by the
Royal Shakespeare Company, Gerald Dickens first performed his solo version of
A Christmas Carol in
America in 1993, returning annually to perform at historic hotels, libraries, theatres and
Dickens festivals. In 2009, Dickens' American tour included such Christmas companies as
Vaillancourt Folk Art and Byers Choice and has yielded national and local press. Based on the readings performed by Charles Dickens himself during his own British and American tours, Gerald Dickens performs one-man theatrical adaptations of
Great Expectations,
Nicholas Nickleby, A Tale of Two Cities and
A Christmas Carol, in the latter creating 26 characters in a performance described by
The New York Times as "a once in a lifetime brush with literary history." He also performs adaptations of short stories such as
The Signal-Man and
Doctor Marigold. Dickens has recorded unabridged
audiobooks of
The Pickwick Papers and
Nicholas Nickleby. In December 2011 he appeared on the
BBC's
Songs of Praise. A keen golfer, he wrote and performs the two-act play
Top Hole!, based on four golfing stories by
P. G. Wodehouse. In 2015, at the Music Box Theatre in
Minneapolis, he played
Charles Dickens in
Jeffrey Hatcher's one-hander
To Begin With, which was adapted from Dickens'
The Life of Our Lord. He played the role again in a 2017 revival. His book,
Dickens and Staplehurst: A Biography of a Rail Crash, published in 2021, is concerned with the
Staplehurst rail crash in which his famous ancestor was involved. In December 2022 he appeared in ''Miriam's Dickensian Christmas'' on the UK's
Channel 4 with
Miriam Margolyes. ==Personal life==