Samuel Garnett Wells, mask of Charles Dickens, watercolour, pencil and porcelain on paper, 1918, Rare Books collection

The immensely popular social realist novels of Charles Dickens (1812–70) have been adapted many times for stage and screen, both during his lifetime and well beyond it. Samuel Wells produced this mask and a series of others for Dickens productions in the 1910s and 1920s, staged at Melbourne’s Theatre Royal on Bourke Street. Some of the masks have holes drilled through the porcelain eyes, while others include human hair.