“Clothing designers sent the grunge look down runways for spring, but thanks to the Dickens Fair, Raleigh will be full of fashionables sporting their own brand of street-urchin wear next weekend.
“Fayetteville Street Mall will be transformed into Victorian England for the street fair celebrating of one of the world’s most celebrated writers.
“Dickens Pen & Inc. — an outgrowth of the Dickens Disciples, kind of a Charles Dickens fan club organized by N.C. State University adjunct English professor Elliot Engel — is offering an incentive: Anyone dressed in period costume gets into the fair free.”
–From “A Dickens of a Dress Code” by Mary E. Miller in the News & Observer (Dec. 4, 1992)
The Dickens Fair ran annually until 1999.