For years a proposed film adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations by one of Britain’s best-loved authors languished in production limbo. The script had even been given the back-handed compliment of an inclusion on an annual list of the best British scripts that could not get made.
It’s a battered brick building behind a high wall in London — austere, overlooked and slated for demolition.
Look closer, and it’s linked to one of Britain’s greatest authors as well as to a shameful period in the nation’s social history.
An ambitious plan to restore Malton’s historical links with Charles Dickens has been abandoned because of apathy and a lack of money.
English Heritage has recommended that a former workhouse in central London that is believed to have inspired Charles Dickens should not be demolished.
The Charles Dickens (Malton) Society has announced plans to terminate the lease on the property on Chancery Lane, said to be the model for Ebenezer Scrooge’s Counting House in A Christmas Carol.
Repairs will be carried out on an Elizabethan townhouse in Rochester that has a Dickensian connection:
Eastgate House, built in the 1590s, features as the Nun’s House in Dickens’s novel, The Pickwick Papers.
“Actor Simon Callow and author Philip Pullman have already given their support to the scheme” which attempts to get children interested in Dickens through theatre.
Miss Havisham, the fraying, fantastical beauty in Charles Dickens’ ‘Great Expectations’, provided the inspiration for a collection of ethereal and dramatic extravagance by the British-based designer brand, Marchesa, at New York Fashion Week.
From the Washington Post review ofThe Magnetic North, Notes from the Arctic Circle by Sara Wheeler:
Among these [arctic stories] is the 19th-century hunt for a Northwest Passage by the inept Sir John Franklin, whose expedition came to a gruesome end when starving participants took to eating the corpses of colleagues who preceded them in death. Wheeler makes the story fresh, however, by emphasizing the reaction of Charles Dickens back home. The most influential writer in England simply willed out of existence the Inuits’ testimony about what they had found at the explorers’ last camp on King William Island in Canada: kettles holding human cutlets. The exploring party couldn’t have been cannibals, Dickens decreed in a magazine article. “The noble conduct and example of such men … outweighs by the weight of the whole universe the chatter of a gross handful of uncivilized people, with a domesticity of blood and blubber.”
Theater veterans Samuel Barnett, Alex Jennings, and Antony Sher, along with Hugo Docking, are all set to play Charles Dickens in Michael Eaton’s Dickens’ London, according to a report on the website for the U.K. magazine The Stage. Each performer will play the writer at a different stage in his life.
The British novelists of whose narrative skills and powers of imagination Mr. Faulks remains most in awe are Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. “Nothing made by humans can be perfect, but surely ‘Emma’ comes as close as any novel in English,” writes Mr. Faulks of Jane Austen’s skilfully crafted tale, before proceeding to wonder at “the void” from which Dickens plucked his “fully imagined characters.”
This article is from 2008, but gives some context to the current controversy surrounding various statues of the author:
In 1869, a year before Charles Dickens died, he wrote in his will that he wanted to be remembered for his work alone. No plaques, no statues, “no monument memorial or testimonial whatever” were to be allowed to commemorate the life of one of Britain’s greatest authors.
The hero of Charles Dickens’s novel “Martin Chuzzlewit,” just off the Liverpool steamer and landed at the port of New York, knows virtually nothing about America, but he learns a little something about it when he attends his first boarding-house dinner. “There were no fewer than four majors present; two colonels, one general, and a captain, so that he could not help thinking how strongly officered the American militia must be and wondering very much whether the officers commanded each other, or if they did not where on earth the privates came from.”
It is understood that the sculpture may represent a character from one of the novels rather than the author who was known to be unhappy at the idea a posthumous depiction of himself. There are hopes that Southwark-based artists will enter a competition.
