WHAT IS DICKENS 2012?
Dickens 2012 is a network formed to celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of one of the greatest writers in the history of the written word, Charles Dickens.
Widely regarded as the finest novelist of the Victorian era, the power of Dickens’s prose, the richness of his characters and his powerful sense of social morality are just as captivating, and just as relevant, in the 21st century. His most famous stories, among them Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, David Copperfield and A Christmas Carol, have spawned films, plays, television dramas, musicals and even rock groups. After Shakespeare, no other writer matches Dickens in terms of global cultural influence. The 200th anniversary of his birth in 2012 offers a unique opportunity to commemorate the life, work and values of a national treasure, not just in Britain but around the world.
With its headquarters in the Charles Dickens Museum in London, Dickens 2012 will become the centre of the international Dickens community in the run up to the bicentenary. Its aim is to highlight Dickens’s importance in the modern age by planning a global calendar of festivals, exhibitions and education initiatives, honouring both his creative genius and his spirit of social justice.
The bicentenary will coincide with the 2012 Olympics, when London will once again prove itself one of the greatest capitals in the world. Dickens 2012 is delighted to share that spotlight with a year-long diary of events in the city which set the stage for the majority of the author’s masterpieces. Beyond London, there will also be similar events across the UK, as well as in our affiliated institutions stretching from America to Japan, Europe and Australia. In joining together, we hope to make Dickens 2012 the worldwide pageant of language and learning his legacy so richly deserves.
WHAT’S THE IDEA BEHIND DICKENS 2012?
Charles Dickens was born on 7 February 1812. By the time of his death on 9 June 1870, he was already the most famous writer in the western world. 130 years later, he’s still known to millions worldwide, whether studied in schools and colleges, read for pleasure or through the multitude of stage and screen adaptations with yet more still in production today.
But Dickens was not just a literary genius. He was also a deeply principled critic of social inequality. One of his most famous novels, Oliver Twist, was written in protest against the inhumane conditions suffered by those forced to live in work houses under the 1834 ‘Poor Laws’. So too, Nicholas Nickleby, in which Dickens exposed the barbarism and corruption of the rural Victorian ‘Yorkshire Schools’ after witnessing them first hand. This compassion for his fellow citizens was fundamental to Dickens, both the writer and the man. Just as important was his love of England and English heritage. In 1851 he began his popular A Child’s History of England, and was also instrumental in the preservation of Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-Upon-Avon (where his signature can still be seen in the visitor’s book). The aim of Dickens 2012 is to commemorate all these aspects as one: Dickens the writer, Dickens the social campaigner, and Dickens’s place within the English heritage he himself so passionately promoted.
Our foremost objective is to provide an international web database to coordinate all Dickens events up to and including 2012, from the many existing festivals which already attract 400,000 people each year to relevant stage productions, screenings, exhibitions and talks. The result will offer a unique, approved calendar of events to the global Dickensian community as well as being a dependable forum for new readers around the world to join in and share their knowledge and enthusiasm.
Other Dickens 2012 objectives include: improved access to his works with free internet resources for both educational and entertainment purposes; the first major Dickens festival in London in over 30 years in and around The Charles Dickens Museum; conservation of rare books in The National Dickens Library; the new ‘Boz Award’ for social journalism in homage to Dickens’s roots as a news reporter under the alias ’Boz’; the National Dickens Literature Youth Contest encouraging young readers to “rediscover the power of words”; and, very much in the spirit of Oliver Twist, a nationwide appeal for children in need.
Beyond the UK, Dickens 2012 will also encourage local bicentenary celebrations across the globe. As 2012 is also the London Olympics, we will be paying a parallel tribute to the games with our own Olympic torch relay - a goose quill used by Dickens which will travel between the main international cities involved in the bicentenary before arriving back in London. These and other activities will combine to make Dickens 2012 a fitting tribute, not only to the culture and community of his age but also to our own culture and community in this age and for future generations to come.
DOES DICKENS STILL MATTER IN THE 21ST CENTURY?
The majority of Dickens’s novels were set in the Victorian London of the mid to late 19th century. So why now, over 130 years after his death, should they still matter to readers in the 21st century?
Like Shakespeare, Dickens has survived and surpassed his own age through the ingenuity of his storytelling and the splendour of his language, as brilliant and alive today as they were when he first put them to paper. Much of Dickens’s immortality is down to his mastery of characterisation, creating some of the most memorable heroes and villains in English literature, from Scrooge and Fagin to Miss Havisham and Mr Pickwick. Unlike today’s novels, all of Dickens’s major works were first published in monthly, and sometimes weekly, magazine form. In effect, his stories were the equivalent of today’s television soap operas. When the final installments of 1840’s The Old Curiosity Shop were published, crowds gathered at the docks in New York where export copies had been shipped and shouted to ask “Is Little Nell dead?”. Such scenes bring to mind the media hysteria of 1980 when Britain and America were gripped by the cliffhanger of “Who Shot J.R. Ewing” in the US TV soap Dallas. 140 years earlier, Dickens was a ratings-winner before television even existed.
The earliest surviving film version of Dickens - an adaptation of A Christmas Carol - dates from 1901. Over a hundred years later his stories are still being filmed for cinema and television. In fact every one of Dickens’s 15 novels has been filmed, at least twice - even his last, The Mystery Of Edwin Drood, which was left unfinished when he died. The BBC’s 2005 serial of Bleak House attracted a staggering 6 million viewers, winning six television BAFTAS. The perennially popular A Christmas Carol has also been parodied by such television classics as The Simpsons, The Six Million Dollar Man, Blackadder and The Flinstones as well as on the big screen by The Muppets and Mickey Mouse.
The adapted cinematic works of Dickens have so far earned 30 Academy Award nominations, winning seven. Five of those went to 1969’s Oliver!, the musical version of Oliver Twist which is about to be revived in London’s West End by Andrew Lloyd Webber with the lead role being cast by the BBC’s latest primetime musical star search, I’ll Do Anything. Dickens has even filtered into popular music: ‘70s heavy rock band Uriah Heep took their name from the snivelling villain of David Copperfield. British indie icon Morrissey has also described Dickens as “very exciting to me”, using a film sample of David Lean’s Oliver Twist on his ‘90s number 1 album, Vauxhall And I.
And lest we forget, after the films, the musicals and the TV programmes, there’s still the books, translated into every known language in print and read by millions. When the BBC conducted their 2003 Big Read survey of the nation’s favourite literature, Dickens came out first equal (alongside Terry Pratchett) in having more titles in the Top 100 than any other author. At the beginning of the 21st century, Dickens’s lasting genius, and relevance, speaks for itself.
WHY SHOULD BRITAIN BE PROUD OF DICKENS?
Although he was born, died, and lived most of his life in England, Dickens’s fame took him around the world. He travelled extensively around Europe, including Italy, Switzerland and France, and twice visited North America (his first trip providing the basis of the novel Martin Chuzzlewit). His lectures and theatrical readings attracted sell out crowds, especially in America where 19th century Dickensmania became a Victorian precursor to 20th century Beatlemania. But Dickens was not just promoting himself and his work, he was also promoting his country and his culture.
That legacy survives today with growing interest both in Dickens himself and the Victorian age he documented in his novels. You can enjoy a drink in Dickens pubs from Latvia to Canada and Australia. There are annual Dickens festivals from Rochester in England to the US states of Texas, North Carolina and Washington. Every year thousands upon thousands of tourists from Europe, Asia and North America flock to London and the South of England to see the city and countryside which shaped Dickens and many other great English novelists of the Victorian era.
While London continues to grow and change, Dickens’s London is still visible in the many ancient streets, bridges and monuments, as well as its free public museums including The V&A - home to a vast collection of Victorian costume and also library to Dickens’s original handwritten manuscripts, bequeathed by his friend and biographer John Forster. Some of the inns featured in his novels are still in business today (e.g. The Boot pub on Cromer Street, a key scene from Barnaby Rudge) while even his fictional characters have their own memorials, such as the plaque marking ‘Nancy’s Steps’ from Oliver Twist on the south side of London Bridge. Most prominent of all is The Charles Dickens Museum in Doughty Street, the house where he lived for two years while writing Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby. Four floors of personal effects and treasures, it is his only London residence still in existence. Other Dickens museums are located in Portsmouth (his birthplace) and Broadstairs (his favourite coastal destination in Kent with its own ‘Bleak House’), while the newly opened Dickens World theme park in Chatham adds another key visitor attraction to the national Dickens map.
To the rest of the world, Dickens is as quintessentially English as Shakespeare, the Royal Family, Sherlock Holmes and fish and chips. Two centuries after his birth, he remains one of our most important cultural ambassadors and a timeless icon of our national culture and character. Dickens 2012 is an opportunity to celebrate and share that icon with the rest of the world. |
