At 200, Dickens remains king of inspiration

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UNSPECIFIED - UNDATED: (FILE PHOTO) Reopened in November 2011, the refurbished Charles Dickens Museum at 48 Doughty Street, London WC1N was home to the English author and his family until 1839. Dickens referred to his Bloomsbury address as 'my house in town', where he wrote some of his best-loved novels, including 'Oliver Twist' and 'Nicholas Nickleby'. Please refer to the following profile on Getty Images Archival for further imagery: http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/Search/Search.aspx?EventId=129915120&EditorialProduct=Archival# English writer Charles Dickens (1812 - 1870), from the original wet-plate negative by Herbert Watkins. (Photo by Rischgitz/Getty Images) R:\Merlin\Getty_Photos\507245094.jpg

Updated: March 6, 2012 8:10AM

In London’s Westminster Abbey on Feb. 7, a ceremony for Charles Dickens’ 200th birthday will star a fellow showman: actor/director Ralph Fiennes.

At her horse ranch in Carmel, Calif., novelist Jane Smiley, a former English professor, will offer her own toast to the great English novelist “who made me want to be a novelist.”

On both sides of the Atlantic, Dickens, who loved to perform, remains a literary force of nature. He’s to writers and filmmakers what Abraham Lincoln is to historians: an endless source of fascination and inspiration.

Through both comic and dark touches, his 15 major novels — from A Christmas Carol, which changed the way the holiday is celebrated, to his semi-autobiographical David Copperfield — sympathized with the poor, especially children. His fictional characters, from Scrooge to Fagin, remain household names.

“Dickens at 200,” an exhibit at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, notes that no other writer — not William Shakespeare, not Jane Austen — has inspired more movie, TV and stage adaptations.

More than 320 movies — dramas, musicals and cartoons — have been inspired by Dickens’ novels. If there’s no all-Dickens cable TV channel, it’s not for lack of material. And more is on the way.

PBS’ Sunday night Masterpiece Classic series will air new British productions of “The Old Curiosity Shop” (Feb. 26), “Great Expectations” (April 1 and 8) and “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” (April 15).

Fiennes and Helena Bonham Carter will star in the latest film version of Great Expectations to be released later this year. And Fiennes plans to direct “The Invisible Woman,” based on Claire Tomalin’s 1991 book about Dickens’ affair with actress Nelly Ternan who was 18 when she met the unhappily married 45-year-old author. (Tomalin also wrote the 527-page Charles Dickens: A Life, released last fall, joining a shelf’s worth of biographies.)

Declan Kiely, curator of the Morgan Library exhibit (open through Feb. 12), credits Dickens’ “brilliant characterization” and “his ear for speech and dialogue.”

Kiely says, “His characters, like his situations — if not his plots, which movies and TV tend to simplify — are memorable and lend themselves extremely well to dramatic adaptation.”

All of Dickens’ work was adapted for the stage during his lifetime, often with the author in the cast. (He died in 1870, worn out at the age of 58.)

On his second visit to America in 1867-1868, a book tour to end all book tours, Dickens wrote home, “Wherever I go, they play [perform] my books, with my name in big letters.”

Publishers, including Penguin and Random House, continue to package Dickens in new covers. Artist Chuck Fisher, who turned A Christmas Carol into a pop-up book in 2010, went digital in December with an iPad app of Carol, complete with Dickensian sound effects.

He remains a staple in classrooms — A Tale of Two Cities is among the College Board’s recommended reading for the college-bound — despite critics who consider his fiction sentimental and implausible.

In ninth grade, Smiley, who wrote Charles Dickens, a 212-page biographical appreciation in 2002, raced through the 900 pages of David Copperfield in two days. In college, she discovered Our Mutual Friend, about the corrupting power of money. It changed her life: Before, she thought “I liked books and writing, and maybe this was something I wanted to do. After I read it, I could do nothing else.”

Gannett News Service