10/02/2012 The Review Show

On the Book Review Show tonight, one man, many characters. The

inimtable, Charles Dickens. Simon Callow sees Dickens as showman and

performer, in his study, one of several buy oing fees. Dickens on

screen, everything from David Lean to The Wire. Who are the authors

that have lingered too long in Dickens' shadow, our panel

nominates favourites. Family favourites, Ethan Hawke talks

through her desert island books. We have great expectations of the

panel, writers all. John Carey the Professor of English at Oxford

University, whose works include What Good Are The Arts. Kate Mosse,

Orange Prize for Fiction winner. Geoff Dyer, a novelist and essayist,

whose recent review of Julian Barnes earned him a nomination.

Good evening and welcome to review show book special, topping off a

week of Dickens celebrations with our own homage. Our panel is here

with their views on the place of Dickens in books. You can e-mail or

tweet us during the show, and we would be delighted to find out what

is your favourite screen adaptation of Dickens, and what novels have

lived too far in his shadow. Simon Callow has come to know Dickens

well, taking on the persona on stage and screen, he has penned a

book about Dickens' theatricality. Publishers are never slow to

realise the potential of a big an versery, and a raft of dick --

anniversary, a raft of Dickens' themed books have hit the shelves.

Four books have dealt with his life in four different ways. Claire

Tomalin's thorough biography, which mines archives in search of new

revelations, Oxford don, Robert Douglas Fairhurst, goes back to his

beginnings to search for the sometimes traumatic experiences

that made the man and sowed the seeds of the fictional children.

And great, great-grand daughter of the man himself, Ethan Hawke, has

delivered a lavishly illustrated bicentenary coffee table book.

Simon Callow, unsurprisingly, has looked at the inate theatricality

of the author, who called him they have The Sparkler of Albion, with

his Charles Dickens Great Theatre of the World. Lives have fascinated

me. I have always been fascinated by greatness, by the idea of

someone projecting themselves into the world on a very large scale.

Wherever you are turn Dickens is performing. He's always on. Even

when he writes a letter, it is a fabulous performance, as an actor,

I know what that means to be always interested in communicating

directly for an audience. To be conscious of the effect you are

having. Here's a flat iron worth its weight in gold. Here is a

frying pan, artificially flavoured. I was fascinated by the degree to

which, as a reader, one is in touch with the writer. You are aware of

this great performer telling his story in a bravura kind of a way.

It seemed to me it might be illuminating to go through his life

and think at what point it touched the theatre. The answer is, at

almost every single point. Clearly the characters are inspired by

theatrical types. Whether we think of them as stereotypes or ark types

is another matter -- arky types, is another matter. They have a clarity,

you know what they are about always. Wait in which he builds them in

long rhetorical arcs. Times the plays can seem like a parade of

eccentricities, or they can seem rather doggedly realistic in

another sense, you know. Other parts of his work. The narrative

tone, the author's voice, the way he intervenes in the story, makes

them something quite else. There is this remarkable thread of

Surrealism in his work, his fan it is a kal writing. -- fantastical

writing. The way they morph and change and take on strange shapes,

until you are almost hallucinating while you are reading, that is hard

to convey on the stage. You would have thought it was easier to

convey on screen, but nobody has tried to do that. Even the most

famous of them, like Oliver Twist, they are heightened, but not

actually fluid in the way that Dickens is. You mean he never went

there, eh, there you are, the boy is an imposter. It can't be, it

can't be. What do you mean it can't be, you old women never believe

anything but quack doctors and lying story books. He was a dear

grateful, gentle time, I know what children are, I have done this for

40 years, people who can't say the same shouldn't say anybody about

them, that is my opinion. That will be all.

They are not quite like Shakespeare's characters, which

seem to have the actual illusion of real and ordinary life about them.

Who seem in the process of flux themselves. Dickens characters are

much more complex. He likes to show them from many different angles, it

is a challenge for a drama tis, and actor and cinematographer. Dickens

was a brilliant stage manager, or producer of the play, He directed

beautifully, and his own performance, it was stunningly

staged, the gas light frameed his face. He never moved from the

lecturn. He was great at commanding the attention of the house, he

would stand before them that his entrance provoked the standing

ovation. He stood there and let it dwindle to nothing. Only then, when

he had achieved total silence would he start, "Marley was dead...". He

often said to people, this is what I should really be doing with my

life. And almost the last comment of that kind was about a week

before he died. He wasing through London, he pointed at a theatre,

and he said, -- he was walking through London, he pointed at

theatre, and he said, do you know what my secret ambition was, he

never waited for an answer, he said I would have been in the theatre,

writing all the plays, assembled my company and controlled them

absolutely. There is this idea of the director as God appealed to

Dickens very much indeed. When he directed plays, and he always acted

in the plays that he directed, he was interested in the whole art of

the theatre. We will talk about the all the buy oing fees as if they

inform -- buy oing fees as if they inform what we are talking about.

Simon Callow, it was said he is Charles Dickens, do you think he's

right about putting theatricality to the fore? I think he's right

about that. His book has got Dickensian dynamism and energy,

which I like. It is only a bit of Dickens, Dickens is many Dickens es.

Nobody could decide what colour eyes he had. It is like that with

biographies. What colour, in a sense, leaves out by this

commanding -- what Callow leaves out, with this demanding theatrical

figure, who is always hiding his own past, is actually the kind of

Dickens that Claire Tomalin brings rather more to the fore, which is

the deeply benevolent man, a man who will give up his time, even at

his busiest, to save a, there is a maid of all works, skivvy, who is

murdered, or has killed her new born child it's on the jury. He

takes pity on her, hires a lawyer, saves her life. He's the age of 28,

he's terribly busy, but he does it. Now, that is not just theatricality.

We will come on to that breath of the Claire Tomalin, that. But

sticking with Simon Callow for a minute. The idea that Dickens is

always on, I thought that was good expression, that he was on. He was

always this character that wanted to dress differently and make a

showman of himself. He himself was a performance, Dickens himself?

Absolutely, I loved the book. He says, right at the beginning, this

is not the proper biography, he lists all the ones he thinks are

better. It is a very valid point. Firstly, because I think Dickens

did write like a director. Everything about his characters are

about entrances and exits, how big they are, how small they are, how

they work with each other. It is theatrical novel writing, more than

anybody else. This second idea of him always being on, is why the

characters still live. He's breathing life into them all the

time, because that is how he lives. All of that sense we get from

Tomalin that he's always on the move. It is that child when I was

six given a penny theatre and making the characters go up and

down. That seam of theatricality, it was not all he was, but

absolutely defining what Callow does, is he's writing gossip,

almost, he's like his best friend. It is not a biography, it is, this

is my friend, I love this man, and I want to be part of it. Did you

get a different sense of Dickens from the Callow book? Dickens comes

across very, very powerfully, you get a real sense of the flesh and

blood character of Dickens, that point that Callow makes about I

have been him. You get the impression that certainly he has.

But then, I think that lion of Warren Mitchell's that he quotes,

you could say you have written this book, we need now to edit you. It

is all written as he speaks, we heard it there now. Dickens is a

great exaggerator, but the exaggeration is always tied to a

particular physical Israelty. Callow's exaggeration goes into the

realm of effusiveness, he said at one point, Dickens exploded like a

nail bomb, and you want to say, no he didn't. There is another

incredible bit, Dickens is 15 and engaged in some sort of amateur

theatrical production on drury lane, and Callow says -- drawery lane,

Callow says it was not a Drury Lane, Callow says it was a world away

from the blacking factory, you think where does that put him,

light years away, but it is only a 20 minute walk. We go to the

passion of Simon Callow to the dispassionate biography that is

Claire Tomalin. As an immense calling on all the archives. She

comes from a point of view of another story she wrote first?

he can first, what better biographer could you have than

Claire Tomalin. It is the most extraordinarily measured piece of

analysis. I loved the Hardy biography for the same reason. The

sense that there are things that we cannot know, but one can tip toe to

the edge of that gap, between knowledge. She then becomes us. She

goes backwards and forwards between saying I think this and that,

suddenly "we" feel this and that. There are certain bits, how do you

deal with the fact that he was a complete sod to his family. She has

an elegant line about looking away from the events of 1858. She's not

judgmental, she is short with things she doesn't care too much

for, the things she doesn't think is important. I really felt that if

anybody had got him right as a person and writer, it was her. I

trusted her. If I only read one it would be that one. Jo there is a

lovely irony, though, and I think - - There is a lovely irony, though,

she has commented on in subsequent editions, the most incredible

revelation in the book, a major encounter with Dotztoyevsqy, and

Dickens says the nice characters are me as I wanted to be, and the

evil characters are me. It turns out the letter was bogus. That is a

biographer's nightmare? I loved the revenge, even with the most

scruplous of the biographers, the fiction creeps in. With the

Fairhurst scam becoming Dickens, a complete low -- Becoming Dickens, a

completely different work, a stimulating idea, someone saying

you think you know the Dickens' trajectory, we have been told it so

many times, but there was jeopardy every moment of his life? It is not

so completely different. You do think when you read it, this is a

new idea of Dickens, young, lost, not really got anything. Losing the

girl he desperately loves. But isn't that actually what is always

behind him. That feeling of love and a grudge. What is good about

the Callow is the rage he thinks is always inside Dickens. The

theatricality is always, the showing off, there is always this

lost and apprehensive boy. I think it actually fits. A lovely book,

beautifully and subtley written. amazing book. It seems that many

biographers are very God at saying on this day he or she -- good at

saying on this day he or she did this and that. To show somebody in

the process of becoming who they are is very, very difficult. It

seems to me, weirdly, there is a precedent for this book, the book

about Bob Dylan in the early years, he's one of a whole number of

would-bes in the Greenwich village scene. Every time Dylan opens his

mouth, it is obvious he will be the winner. This book is that

precariousness of it, that if this had happened, and that had not

happened. What it really does, it removes the whole sort of

inevitability, it makes Dickens incredibly fresh and new. From the

very point of if he hadn't been in Warren's Blacking House, if his

father hadn't been in the debtors prison, he wouldn't have written

and written again about children who are in desperate straits and

who don't know what their future is. There is a great line, quoting GK

Chesterton, that because children lack historical perspective, there

is and lost child can suffer like a lost soul. You have the sense that

Dickens is revisiting that endlessly, with Twist, David

Copperfield. Don't you think it was why he was such a terrible husband,

he didn't love Catherine. She loved someone else, she wouldn't have him.

The girl he loved was Mary, the younger Hogarth sister, Catherine's

sister. Callow interestingly suggests that he only really

married Catherine, because it was arranged that Mary would be in the

house with them. This worshiped being would be with them. Then we

have Georgina, the younger interest sister, who takes over? He doesn't

love her. The thing for me, I liked the idea you look at a couple of

years of somebody's life before they were them. Is that news? We

all stumble, bit by bit, writers are always mythologyising

themselves, and asked how it happened, and coming up with a good

tale. It seemed self-evident. The thing for the Tomalin, for me, was

that a lot of people might have sat in a blacking factory, a lot of

people might have had unrequieted love, and a lot of people feeling

resentment against their mother in this particular case. What she for

me does, is saying, yes, all those things could happen to any number

of people, but there was something that was just a bit more great

about him. That's what I think that biography says. It is more than

just the sum of the parts. It is not just your experience, there has

got to be that greatness in there. Finishing this particular

conversation here with the slightly spongey coffee table Charles

Dickens, with the inserts and everything else. That is inevitably

what we will get in a centinary, do you think it is well done? I read

it on my kindle. It is charming, it is lovely to see all the old

theatre tickets and stubs. Some of the pull-outs are rather wonderful.

There is a pull-out of Dickens' reading of Sykes and Nancy, with

his an notetations, go loud and -- anotations, go loud and soft.

will be hearing from Lucinda Dickens later in the programme.

While the novels were adapted for the stage, even as he was writing

them, the screen adaptations took longer. Let's look at cherished

classics. Dickens' characters are ready-made for the screen, Heggity,

and Uriah Heep, and Miss Havisham. For many the introduction to

Dickens has not been on the page but on film. There is a Dickens

season, featuring much-loved and rarely seen adaptations of the

works. Including Roman Polanski's 2005 take on Oliver Twist, and

almost 60 years later, David Lean's seminal Great Expectation. Who is

it? Pip, come to play. Come nearer, let me look at you. There are more

than 400 screen adaptations of Dickens' stories, since the

earliest cinema, directors have been influenced by the way he

juxtaposed his scenes. Dickens' juxtaposition of screens was

minutatic, ready to film. We think that is interesting. Really by the

30s, when you have big prestige Hollywood productions, MGM got

their teeth into it, it was a box- office triumph in Hollywood. From

Friday night serials to big-budget TV adaptations, Dickens has been TV

gold. From the 1952 version of the Pickwick, to Ray Winstone and

Gillian Anderson's star in Great Expectation on the BBC One last

Christmas, and the BBC Two-parter of the unfinished story, The

Mystery Of Edwin Drood. Thy will be done. No! Dickens, as

we know, loved acting, he wanted to be an acting. He would have adored

the values brought together in a big budget production. Dickens's

acting was hampered for years, he would be tickled to become one

finally, appearing the Muppets A Christmas Carol, and Doctor Who?

Charles Dickens, the Charles Dickens, you are brilliant, you are

brilliant. From the ridiculous to the sublime, his influence can be

found in surprising places. Look at something like The Wire and the way

it plays with episodeic structure that he was so good at that TV has

picked up. It has all the standard Dickensian elements, abandoned

urchins, flawed heros, villains and cheats, terrible social decay in

Baltimore, social injustice. Please, Sir, I want some more. Can film and

TV do justice to the intricate detail, multitude of characters and

massive scale of Dickens' world, or is it inevitably a two-dimensional

experience. Stella? Finns is that you?

I don't know about you, I first came across Dickens as a ten-year-

old watching an early adaptation of Great Expectation, when the books

were still on the shelf. I didn't come in that way. Wrote in scenes,

didn't he? Me too, I first saw, it was. Oliver, it was Great

Expectation, with James Mason. That is my love. Wonderful Margaret Leig

hton. A lot of us come to Dickens, in the first place, on screen. I

think to answer the question in the film, we will talk about the film.

But I think Callow is right, that Dickens belongs on stage not film.

I think there is always something about the non-moving, breathing

parts in front of you, which is slightly missing for me in film

adaptations. The episode structure is amazing, he would have been a

screen writer, there is no doubt at all. He has this epic imagination

and brings everybody on, film can deliver that. But the breathing

stuff, the living, breathing stuff I think he belongs on stage more.

You can also say, where as many of his books were big and blousey, and

had hundreds of characters, the whittling down and the editing

makes some of his charactering stand out all the more. Miss

Havisham is just one of the best characters you will come across in

a book? It is funny, the attraction of Dickens, obviously, is he is so

visual, he had the visual power, extremely, I think, Virginia Wolf

said, that creates a problem, if you think of a problem like Wemick,

in Great Expectation, his identifying physical identification,

his Post Office mouth. When you can see in this way, it is what John

emphasises in his work, the violin effigy, the thing of a post box

walking around. With film you can't get the Post Office mouth. You just

have a gob. You can't film metaphor, I thought Callow was quite right

about that. In the book Miss Havisham, Pip says, he had once

been taken to a ghastly waxwork at a fair, I had once been taken to

one of the old churches where a skeleton and the ashes of a rich

dress was dug out. Now, the skeleton and waxwork seemed to come

together with dark eyes and move at me. How do you film that. Let's

look at the particular lean lone moment when Pip comes to visit --

Lean moment when Pip comes to visit Miss Havisham, for the second time.

Do you know what that is there? can't guess what it is, mam? It is

a great cake, a bride cake. Mine. On this day of the year, long

before you were born, this heap of decay was brought here. It and I

have worn away together. Mice have knawed at it. And sharper teeth

than teeth of mice have g nawed at me. That is wonderful, but the

horror you imagine for yourself, it is more vivid, what he does. It

makes you realise how brilliant he is. In David Lean's Oliver Twist,

some of it is better than Dickens. He leaves out the Rose plot, and

the ending with the crowds, the flambo and Sykes falling off the

roof, particular dick would have loved that, he would have liked it

in film. -- Dickens would have loved that, he would have liked it

in film. In Great Expectation when Pip goes to London, we have this

strange Jimmy Clithero, John Mills looks 40. He is 40. I mean when he

goes to London first of all, he's meant to be 20. Yeah imagine

getting an actor more than 40 to play it is bonkers. Also curious,

though I think the Lean films are terrific, nonetheless, curiously

they have dated more than the books. Yeah, it is funny. Once John Mills

hopes his mouth and speaks in a clearly upper-class accent. Back in

the 1970s the Dickens didn't look so old fashioned, the fashion

coincided, in The Mystery Of Edwin Drood drood, there is a lot of Pete

-- drooddroddrod, there is a lot -- The Mystery Of Edwin Drood, there

is a lot more fashion there. It came together. What happened in The

Mystery Of Edwin Drood, he didn't finish it, so Gwnyeth Hughes, a

brilliant screen writer picked it up and ran with it and finished it.

It so outlandish? It was brilliant. You mustn't give the ending away in

case people haven't watched it. It is 0 convoluted, just like Dickens,

the ending like Oliver Twist, where everyone is related in ways you

hadn't suspected. It is brilliant. The reincarnation, the thing about

Dickens, he's so firmly rooted in the 19th century, the stories he's

writing about. There has been modern adaptations,

but can he do Shakespeare? With Shakespeare it is obligatory you

modernise it. Dickens' characters, they are mythic figures in the same

way Shakespeare's are. But he's the novelist of Victorian society. The

great difficulty I think, is Dickens is writing in a new form. A

pure modernist, Ruskin, said. He writing about a rapidly changing

society, with amazingly changing innovations, what a film needs to

do, you don't need to update it and set it in modern times. You have to

make sure it doesn't look like some version of The Good Old Days. It

has to look good. -- looking new. We have to make it stop looking

like costume drama, easy for Wuthering Heights, with the Andrea

an nold thing. There is only one Dickens adaptation I have seen on

screen that does it, Alec Guinness's Little Dorrit dort. It

is lovingly done, but doesn't look that way. Dickens' towering

reputation as the greatest Victorian novelist has overshadowed

many cop temp rees, in case you have had your -- contemporaries, in

case you have had your fill, we have asked our panel for their

suggestions. As Robert Douglas Fairhurst showed,

many of Dickens' characters were inspired by people he met in real

life. But given his complex and sometimes cruel relationship with

women, would he have written such a smart and gutsy heroin as William

Makepeace Thackeray's Becky Sharp. I wonder, might I. But it is not

just women on the Major-General, Kate Mosse thinks it is time we

remembered -- the page, Kate Mosse thinks it is time we remembered

Charles Dickens' contemporaries. Mary Elizabeth Braddon was a

popular writer of sensational novels, like Lady Audley's Secret,

a murder and revenge plot set in high society. Is it time to

reappraise Braddon's career. And Mary Aug hton wrote about women

coming of age. She wrote wild supernatural fiction.

Dickens is often lauded as a man of his time. But John Carey wants us

to read works of Victorian novelists delving into the future.

American writer and socialists Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward,

looks ahead to the year 2000, and transports a young man from 19th

century Boston to a 20th century utopia. Longstreet before man

launched into face, in the First Men On The Moon, HG Wells

chronicles a journey by a businessman and scientist, who

discover a sophisticated civilisation of insects. They are

giving us the fundamentals of life, food, they do understand. If you

are looking for a contrast to the great English novelist, dire

destroyer dire thinks you can do worse than turning to the trail

blazing German novelist, Nitze, and his thoughts on cattle.

There is nothing like philosophy. Tell me, Nizer? I'm not so brain

addled that I'm under the impression he's a long lost

Victorian novelist. There is the bit in the beginning of Great

Expectation, when Pip will make take the meat pie and file to

Magwitch. He sees this cattle and starts talking to them. It reminds

me of this, "consider thele, grazing as they pass you buy, they

do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they are

fettered to the moment, and thus, neither melancholy or bored, this

is a hard sight for man to see, for though he thinks himself better

than the animals, because he is human, he cannot help envying them

their happiness. What they have, a life neither bored or painful, is

precisely what he wants. But he cannot have it because he refuses

to be like an animal. A human being may well ask an animal, why do you

not speak to me of our happiness but stand and gaze at me. The

animal would like to answer and say, the reason is, I almost forget what

I was going to say, but then he forgot this answer too and stayed

silent so the human being was left wondering." It could be passage

from a novel, but more modern. could be your tension that he read

Great Expectation? I'm not going to go down that letter route. Dickens

has not always been someone to be lauded. He has been loinised at the

moment, but other Victorian novelists, particularly, you talk

about Vanity Fair? Dickens was scorned by the intellectuals of the

day. To a large he can tent. I think that van -- he can tent,

Vanity Fair is an incredible novel in a way Dickens isn't, Dickens

couldn't have done Becky Sharp. He couldn't depict the corrupt and

sinister upper-class. He really didn't know about the upper-class.

Thackeray did, he was a public school man, loved going to society

dinners. Ruined him as a Noelist. But he knew what Lord Stain, was

like. Dickens could never have painted such a figure. Is the other

side of -- it is the other side of Victorian society, and a cynical

view of society. Dickens loved people, Thackeray didn't. You look

at neglected authors who were great sellers in their day, particularly

women? I would, wouldn't I. I think there is a very important point

here. This way of telling the history of who the great writers

were. Tends to fix on one person. Exactly as you say, that he is the

chronicler of Victorian England. What is wonderful about novel

writing and reading is everyone was blooming well at it. Many writers

were selling loads. As we still have those people who sell well

looking down on those who don't. For me there were many women doing

very, very well as novelists. erpls it of literary novelists,

there was the Brontes. And George Eliot. You had Mrs Humphrey Ward.

Mrs Gaskill, for me, I think, there is a plurality of voices in fiction,

and that is always more honest and more true to what readers are doing.

We should listen to the readers. Across the board, and lady

AUDIENCE:'s secret, is it -- Lady Audley's Secret, is it a good

novel? You say he looked at what happened to prostitutes and in the

courts, and changed the times, you are looking at those looking to the

future? Edward Bellamy founded a political party in America, people

took him seriously. His idea was you abolish money, and issue a

credit card, which represents an exactly equal share in the national

surplus. You join the national army, it is a were, industrial army at 21,

you retire at 45 and you get this in retirement or while working, an

exact low equal share in the national product.

-- exactly equal share in the national product. People took it

seriously and thought that was the way. In Wells, he looks at a

society that is a slave society. In The Man, children are surgically

manipulated for their jobs, if you are going to be a scolar, you have

hardly any body at all, just an enormous brain packed with the

knowledge of libraries, and carried around in a tub like a shadowing

jelly of knowledge. It is a dictatorship, the grand lunar, who

rules the moon, one of the astronauts tried to explain to him

what democracy is. This huge brain. It gets so hot trying to understand

it, they had to spray it with water to keep it cool. Dickens was firmly

rooted in his moment and time as a reformer. He didn't have the idea

of looking to the future about when things would change. Yet he saw all

the different changes in society? The changes chronicled, but one of

the most important things about Dickens is, he put on the paiing

people that were never put on the page -- page people that were never

put on the page by other people. It was the forgotten people who were

the heros. We talked a little earlier about the celebratory book

by Dickens' great, great-grand daughter, Ethan Hawke. As he was

preparing for his memorial service earlier this week, having donned,

appropriately, a fabulously Dickensian hat, she took a moment

to tell us about her favourite novels.

John Forster's Room With A - EM Forster's A Room With A View I read

when I was a teenager, it played me long to go to Italy. Every time I

go there I think about the book. He writes lyrically and beautifully.

This book and work was destroyed and had to be rewritten and

reedited. It is fantastic, it is dark and uncomfortable book to read,

you are laughing at things you shouldn't be. It is the most

brilliant novel about oppression and the way people live underneath

it. It is very funny and outlandish. The bok is about a mother and her

children who go travelling to Morocco, I love it t it is written

through the eyes of the older daughter, she's five years old.

There is these wonderful phrases throughout, she's trying to work

out what the words immediate, the reason it is called Hidious Kinky

are the two words their -- the sisters love, they just say them

outloud all the time. Think it is about Esther Freud's life being

taken off by her parents. Being related to Dickens, I'm always

asked which is my favourite, that is hard to answer. A Tale Of Two

Cities is one of his least humourous novels, that doesn't mean

it is not one of his best. It is one of only two historic novels he

wrote. He wrote this about the French revolution, very influenced

by his friend, Thomas Carlyle's historic book on the French

revolution. You feel what it must have felt like to be in Paris at

that time. It is just a wonderful description of a time when the

world seems gone complete low mad. I have never got to the end of the

bok without sobbing -- sobbing. I fall in love with the hero of the

book, which is difficult because he's an alcoholic. We have this

great canon of Dickens' books, a lot are not read, there are the

main ones that are known. Do you think as a writer in 100 years

there will be the same adoration? It will take 50 years of hangover

to get over this incredible Dickens binge we have been having. It seems

to me that the books that we are reading now, the ones that have

dropped out of view, are going to remain out of view. Things like

Bleak House, Little Dorrit, they will not look any worse 200 years

from now than they do now. It is because he can make people laugh

and cry. That is an enormous gift for a novelist, it is also because,

as you said, he stands for the weak against the strong. That will live.

When we were talking about the sheer size of some of these books,

the detail, the lack of editing and so forth. Do people have the same

patience for that. They will read lots of huge thrillers and so forth,

will they drill down into all these characters of Dickens, do you think,

and take the time to do so? have to learn to eat fast, haven't

you. True, I think actually you put your finger on it, the reason, not

us, obviously, 300 years times. Unless there is a miracle! Is that,

in the end,'s not just the master of the story and the episodeic

novel and the nature of that. But the nature of the characters. We

are novelists, any novelist I know, to have one character that has

stepped off the page into real life. He has loads. The Artful Dodger,

Miss Havisham. Scrooge. That is why in 300 times, they live outside the

books. Tell me your favourite Dickens' character? Estella, the

most desirable woman in fiction. like Wemick, since all the Dickens'

celebration have started, if my wife passes the slice of toast, I

reply "thank-ye". Thank you to my guests tonight. For further

information on everything we have discussed on tonight's show and a

treasure trove of other clips, look at the website, you can get in

touch via e-mail. Matter that will be here with guests to discuss the

Lucian Freud exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London,

a new book by Colm Tobin, and the work of Martin Scorsese. We are

almost Dickens ed out, the Muppets returned to the screens today. On

the wintry evening, here is their rousing rendition of Dickens'

Christmas classic. # There goes Mr Heartless

# There goes Mr Cruel # He never gives

# He only takes # If meanness is a way of life

# You practice and rehearse # All that work is paying off