Charles Dickens, Park Theatre, New York City

This was the ball room as organized by a committee of citizens of New York at the Park Theatre to welcome Charles Dickens, on Monday, February 14, 1842. The event was called the "Boz Ball". Original title: View of the interior of the Park Theatre on the night of the Great Boz Ball; with the Elizabethan Chamber, and the Tableaux from Boz's Works. Illustration published in the front page of The New York Herald, February 16, 1842. The tableaux was painted by Hillyard, the scene painter to the house at the time.

Charles Dickens (1812-1879) was an English journalist and one the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His literary success began with the 1836 serial publication of the Pickwick Papers. "Boz" was his family nickname and he employed it as a pseudonym for some years. In his first visit to the United States, Dickens arrived in New York, on February 12, 1842, and stayed at the Carlton House Hotel, one of the most luxurious establishments in Manhattan at the time. He spent about one month in New York City.

The New York Herald reported at least three thousand persons present at the Boz Ball, at least eighteen hundred ladies. There was a crowd outside the Theatre. Inside the house was beautifully ornamented. The drop curtain at the back of the stage was painted like the frontispiece of the Pickwick Papers. Dickens and his wife Catherine were received by the Mayor Robert Hunter Morris at the Elizabethan Chamber, in the Theatre. Dickens was then 30 years old. He had achieved impressive success in Great-Britain and his popularity in the Unites States was immense.