From Charles Dickens' "Nicholas Nickleby (1839): The Audience of the Crummles Theatre Company.

Nicholas and Smike leave London and travel towards Portsmouth, with some intention of becoming sailors. At an inn, they encounter the theatrical manager Vincent Crummles, who hires Nicholas on sight as his new juvenile lead and as playwright, adapting French tragedies into English and modifying them for the troop's minimal dramatic ability. Nicholas and Smike join the acting company and are warmly received by the troupe, which includes Crummles's formidable wife, their daughter, "The Infant Phenomenon," and many other eccentric and melodramatic thespians. The episode is somewhat akin to the Shakespeare episode in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn.

Nicholas and Smike make their debuts in "Romeo and Juliet," as Romeo and the Apothecary respectively, and are met with great acclaim from the provincial audiences. This episode has been restaged with the rest of the novel with great success by the R.S.C. and other Shakespeare companies, recreating the version in which Romeo and Juliet survive, with all the other characters but Tybalt! Dickens dedicated "Nicholas Nickleby" to his friend Charles Macreay, a leading Shakespeare actor and manager of the Covent Garden Theatre.

Picture and some data courtesy of the Yorck Project, under Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License (Wikipedia).