Dickens tale How a cold turned would-be actor into an author

As a sliding doors moment, it leads to arguably one of the greatest "what if?" questions in literary history.

- Caroline Davies

As a sliding doors moment, it leads to arguably one of the greatest "what if?" questions in literary history. Passionate about the theatre, Charles Dickens, then just 20, wrote to the Covent Garden theatre actor-manager George Bartley seeking an audition, saying he believed he "had a strong perception of character and oddity, and a natural power of reproducing in my own person what I observed in others".

Bartley responded saying they were producing "the Hunchback" and arranged an appointment. Dickens planned to take his sister, Fanny, to accompany him singing on the piano. Then Dickens fell ill "with a terrible bad cold" and missed the audition. By the time the next season came around he had embarked on the parliamentary reporter job that would set him on his path to novelist. Would the world have been deprived of his literary canon but for that cold?