Marley is alive: to begin with.
Forgive my paraphrasing the opening line of A Christmas Carol, but it seems apt when describing Dickensian, BBC1’s new 20-part drama, populated by characters from Dickens. So, Jacob Marley lives, as does Little Nell; Miss Havisham is a young lady in mourning black, not yet the jilted bride in jaundiced white. Writer Tony Jordan, of EastEnders fame, has plucked about 30 of Dickens’s characters from the huge number created by Dickens and set them in motion in a single Victorian street.
It is ambitious, but, like Oliver Twist, I want more. Please, Mr Jordan, sir, can we have some of those amazing characters you left out?
I feel I’ve earned them. Some time ago I set myself the task of reading all 15 of Dickens’s novels, and this week I finally reached the end. That’s 3,859,231 words, and would have been more had Dickens lived to complete The Mystery of Edwin Drood. It took him 34 years to write these books; it took me 10 to read them. I kept getting sidetracked by celebrity memoirs. I was forced to abandon The Old Curiosity Shop after a couple of chapters for the autobiography of Jade Goody, and didn’t get back to it for ages. The irony is that Jade Goody could be a character from that book, a good-hearted serving wench, generous with her mutton pies. Hers is the sort of meaningful name Dickens favoured. See also: Tyson Fury, Amy Winehouse, Donald Trump.
Dickens’s characters will live for ever: Scrooge, Fagin, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield – and Dickensian features some of these. But read deeply and the real treasures emerge. Take The Old Curiosity Shop’s Dick Swiveller. This young toper has a heart of gold, but little else in the way of that particular metal. He is a penniless gentlemen who affects to believe his bedsit home is a lofty set of chambers, and who carries around a small greasy book in which he notes the London streets along which he can no longer stroll for fear of encountering creditors. His allowance, which he receives from a rich aunt, goes mainly on brandy.
Dickensian would be improved, I feel, by the inclusion of Dick. Ditto Ninetta Crummles, AKA the Infant Phenomenon, teenage member of a theatrical troupe in Nicholas Nickleby, who has been “kept up every night, and put on an unlimited allowance of gin and water from infancy, to prevent her growing tall”. The novels are full of these minor miracles and miraculous minors. Although Dickens invented 989 named characters, his works are said to include 13,000 individuals: equivalent to the populations of, say, Chatteris and Catterick shoved together. Dickensville is overcrowded.
Me, I’m moving out: Tolstoytown beckons. Given there are 580 characters in War And Peace alone, I might just wait for the BBC adaptation in January.
• Dickensian begins on BBC1 at 7pm on Boxing Day with a second episode at 8.30pm.
