Dickens: The People's Man

media celebrity? Robert Hall has been investigating.

The bells of London's Southwark Cathedral are pealing to honour a

literate hero. A man whose books have never gone out of print.

is a human being writing these books and you feel that you are in

his presence. The ordinary people of England felt that he was writing

for them. That has continued to be the case. He was a rock-star, the

most famous man in the world. who has inspired plays, films and

musicals. His stories tugged at the heart strings. We love that sort of

thing. For two centuries, Charles Dickens has been a constant

presence. But what of the man behind the public face? What

produced the ingredients that have combined to create that lasting

Royal visitors to a modest terrace house in central London. Here to

celebrate a birthday in the rooms where Charles Dickens raised his

family, reflected on his childhood and wrote one of his most famous

stories, Oliver Twist. Today, this street is home to the Dickens

Museum, crowned with reminders of his books and characters, of the

places that were still so vivid in his mind. The heritage that Dickens

saw and created is surrounding us. There are dozens of trails in

London, Kent, other parts of the country where people can follow in

his footsteps. 200 years after the day he was born, Charles Dickens

would barely recognise these streets. And yet, he and his

characters are all around us - in our book shops, theatres and even

on our street signs. What is it about this man that fascinates us?

Pickwick Papers. Little Dorrit. Great Expectations. David

Copperfield. Bleak House. Oliver The books we all know so well are

the starting point of a journey that takes us down the old

stagecoach road to the towns of Chatham and Rochester. This is

Ordnance Terrace, perched above the naval dockyard. It is where Charles

Dickens's father worked and a starting point for the walks

through town and countryside that made such a deep impression on his

son. He wrote about what he knew. He knew about the different

buildings. Sometimes he wrote of them exactly as they were.

Sometimes he disguised them. Often, you will find that a building in

Rochester becomes a building in Chatham or the other way around.

Dickens grew up, his walks strayed further from the noisy streets

around his home. To the desolate windswept marshes bordering the

Thames Estuary. They would later provide the setting for Pip's early

life in Great Expectations. An afternoon funeral helped to inspire

this dramatic encounter. Do you not want it? I will have it. Some of

the strongest surviving links between Charles Dickens' past and

his present can be found in the city of Rochester, this hotel where

he stayed and were Mr Pickwick and his friends partied into the night.

The Guild Hall where he serves as an apprentice. And this house

features in the same story. It is where Charles Dickens imagined Pip

walking the dusty corridors to meet Miss Havisham. You are the boy from

the forge. Yes, madam. Those who created the latest version of the

story found themselves drawn into the past and into Charles Dickens'

imagination. He was so specific about the human condition of the

time. His descriptions of characters and the state of being

at that time in England, they are part of our historical record of

what it was like back then. From the Medway towns, the Dickens trail

goes upstream to a 21st century capital.

But look closer and you will find tiny fragments of its Victorian

past. The cobbled streets where a small boy explored a crowded and

unfamiliar world. There are still paths through London you can take

where you get an incredible sense of the place Charles Dickens lived

in and that he experienced. There is an incredible amount of

information and images that survive from the Victorian period. One

thing that I have taken to heart was looking at the photographs of

Victorian London when Charles Dickens was alive in a new way

alongside the text that he is writing. We also have fantastic

photographs of London. But in the end, you return to the description.

This is the Dickensian world captured by the photos and drawings

brought together by the Museum of London. It is a mix of wealth and

extreme poverty. It attracted and repelled the man determined to

bring it to life through his characters. He walked the streets

of London night and day, every nook and cranny. And he hated it, I

think. It was dirty, corrupt, so full of crime. He hated the social

divisions. He found the houses of the rich unpleasant and the places

where the poor lived, absolutely horrible. But also fascinating.

That fascination runs like a thread through the dramas unfolding in

these pages. We learned a great deal about the dark side of

Victorian society and Charles Dickens' anger at the plight of the

poor. A Christmas Carol - a ghost story of Christmas.

Anger that's all too clear on a rainy night in today's Manchester

suburbs where a familiar story is unfolding. Like so many before them,

the Charlton Players are telling a seasonal tale with a clear a moral

message. What I like is about the bankers being very rich, the poor

being very poor. I like the parallels with today's society.

What do you want with me? You don't believe in me! Why do you

doubt your senses? He had thought of writing a pamphlet about the

lack of education being offered to children in England, poor children,

and instead he decided to write a Christmas Carol, which brings in

these children. He makes a tremendous point through his

fiction. Charles Dickens walked up to 20 miles per day in search of

the cast who would eventually populate his stories and the plays

that followed within months of publication. He began his writing

career as a journalist and social commentator but fiction brought

real fame. This was the platform he could use to bring about change.

was entirely driven by his sense of outrage against the injustice of

life for some people. He took up the cause of the disadvantaged from

his very earliest writings as a journalist and then in his novels.

He was always speaking for the oppressed and the socially rejected,

the economically unviable. He was always trying to heal society. He

wrote about it with such passion and compassion because of his own

experiences as a boy. Experiences which can be glimpsed in the London

borough of Southwark. At the George Inn, final destination of the

stagecoach that brought the Dickens family from Kent, and in the

churchyard once overshadowed by another infamous London landmark,

it is still possible to find traces of the world which inspired his

writing. This is the old site of the prison. At the age of 12,

Charles Dickens saw his father locked up for debt. He began to

understand what it was like to pay the price for disadvantage. Dickens

spent time in this factory on the banks of the Thames river to boost

the family income. My whole nature was penetrated with grief and

humiliation. When he gained the opportunity to intervene, Charles

Dickens seized it with his customary enthusiasm. This is the

Victorian chapel of Great Ormond Street. A children's hospital which

owes its existence to his generosity. It was an area of

London that he knew really well. He did this special reading of A

Christmas Carol. He raised an enormous sum of money for the

hospital. Great Ormond Street as we know it today must say a great big

thank you to Charles Dickens for what he did. Charles Dickens was

the first media celebrity. The public devoured every word he wrote

and packed his public performances. His daughter tells us that when he

was writing his books, he would look up and look in the mirror and

check the expression on his face and write it down. Because it was a

performance for him. He was being those characters in the same way

that an active becomes characters. -- actor does. He was reaching out

to you as the narrator. He catches you with his glinting eye, climbs

on to your lapel and tells you his story. That voice runs all the way

through the novels. Charles Dickens gave his final

public reading in March, 1870. His health was failing and he sent off

to Kent to work on his last novel, the Mystery of Edwin Drood. It was

never completed. He died a few It has turned very dark, sir? Is

there any light coming? It is coming fast, fast, the cart is

shaken altarpieces and the rugged road is there any are its own --

end. This month, in Poets corner at Westminster Abbey, beneath the

memorials to Britain's great literary figures, the words written

in another era rang out once more. Dead, right reference and wrong

reverence of every order, dead, men and women born with heavenly

compassion in your hearts and dying this around us. Every day. An actor

and director who will play Dickens himself in a forthcoming film.

Ralph Fiennes paid his tribute surrounded by a tribute --

surrounded by a congregation which included the largest number of

Dickens descendants ever assembled. And yet the author never envisaged

public honour. Charles Dickens would be somewhat surprised to

remember him -- to find himself remembered in this way in

Westminster Abbey. He had asked to be buried in Rochester. Such was

the public demand that he be treated as a great national figure

that it was decided alternative plan would have to be made. A quite

a number of the people who are buried here did not actually expect

that would happen. The same is true with Charles Darwin. He is here. He

expected to be buried in his local churchyard. Dickens expected to be

buried locally, where he died, at Gads Hill. The Dean intervened and

said no, he is a great man, we must have him here. Amongst other great

writers, as a great poets. -- others great poets. Charles Dickens

wrote his last words that Gads Hill, the home in Kent which he had first

seen as a child. Today, it rings with the young voices of the School

rehearsing its own anniversary tribute. Dickens was one of the

greatest writers in British history and he is brilliant at -- when you

read his books. It comes across in the play, he is really good to

listen to this has stopped everyone enjoys his books when they have

read them. I have heard a lot of people who have read his books and

enjoyed them and I keep thinking these are going to keep on going

forever, books like Anthony Horowitz, this will keep on going.

I think Dickens has got something that everyone can relate to. People

have done so many different adaptations, different movies,

plays, and it makes it more interesting and makes it come alive.

And that is what makes Charles Dickens a survivor, even as he

worked in his study at Gads Hill others were taking his stories to

new audiences. Before he had finished a story it was dramatised

and all over England there were theatres and small theatre

companies come a travelling theatre companies, and if you look at the

theatre bills you will see the plays were done in all sorts of

versions all over the British Isles so that people, even illiterate

people who could not read stories, knew about them and knew about the

characters. What was that clanking noise? It seemed to come from in

the cellar. As if a person would dragging heavy chains across stones,

up it came come up on what and upward. It is to do first of all

with his genius for creating these characters, these unforgettable

characters. We refer to a person as a Scrooge or a Mrs CAB or Pecksniff

or Uriah Heep, you know. It is to do with his fantastic genius for

narrative, storytelling. His fantasy in language, his

extraordinary metaphorical genius, his bewitching, magical way with

words, with language. But even as theatre audiences flocked to the

Dickens experience in towns and cities all over the UK, technology

was about to take his stories and his drama worldwide. These

remarkable images, compiled by the British Film Institute to mark the

bicentenary, showed the first attempts to capture the essence of

Dickens on silent film. Film-makers and actors absolutely loved Dickens

and one to continually reinvent and interpreter and adapt his work and

we want to be able to reflect the long history of Dickens in film and

television, right from the very beginnings of film. More and more

people around the country and around the world really got in

touch with us and said that they wanted to be part of it and it has

become a very global celebration of Dickens and his enduring legacy.

Ten seconds to get back into the workhouse tableaux. Ten, nine,

eight... A legacy which flourishes at every level. These are the

children's of Manchester's All Saints Primary, tapping into

Dickens for his sense of history and a spur to their own imagination.

I think they have all seen things on television about Dickens but

when they actually live as a Dickens child would do, it makes it

more pertinent to them so we have them acting out how it would be in

a workhouse or how it would be in a kitchen and they love it because

they feel that they are learning. Christmas Carol was published,

excellent. It is best -- better than most books that are out now

and I'd definitely would reader Charles Dickens's book than a book

that is out now because they are better and more dramatic and they

have twists in them. They are good, yes, really good. I think he is a

very good author and when you read his books, when you stop at a

certain part you want to read more, you don't want to stop. His books

are really interesting and not boring. When I have books at home I

want to read more and more of them because they are so interesting.

But away from the classroom can we still have a connection with

Dickens? Where better to find out than in the county where he grew up.

We would like to hear your experience of living on the estate,

or wherever, now. At community centre on Gravesend -- Gravesend

Dickens Estate, a group of interested volunteers are looking

back into history. The real question is does Dickens matter

today? See him up there, you're going to go and pick pocket him.

How many people have been picked pocketed or had their bags stolen?

They took everything, all my money, my case with jury and something I

had sent to Ireland, they took the lot. A Dickens was not just a story,

it is a permanent reality. What do you mean by this? What do you mean

by burn my body? Suddenly Charles Dickens was no longer just a figure

from the past. It was all down to earth, but is what I like. Look at

the beauty in your eyes, you were wonderful and special. Those of us

who live here can breathe it, smell it and walk it. Three cheers for

that great man, Charles Dickens. Hip hip. Hooray. Of course it all

began set Dickens's' birthplace in Portsmouth but the celebrations

have extended to virtually every continent. -- Dickens' birthplace.

New books have jostled for space on our bookshelf, authors bisecting

him in all his faults. I think the way he was able to write for the

modern film so perfectly the period drama, you can't do anything about

it, his description is so amazing. That brings it alive. Action.

wonder film-makers are finding new ways to tell the stories, even

those Dickens could not complete. Like him I am a Kentish writer. I

really hoped I would not be the second Kentish writer died halfway

through The Mystery Of Edwin Drood, because it was really difficult, a

mountain to climb. The thing I love is his characters are so vivid. He

had given me a bunch of vivid, fantastic, exciting characters, so

I put them in the back of the bus and took them on the journey and

completed it. But at the beginning and the Emma Baugh Trail is a man

whose observation and imagination created the characters of the

scenes that still holders in their grasp. At the heart of the tallest

this massive compassion, this massive feeling of combating

injustice -- at the heart of it all is this massive compassion. It is

shocking to report that many of his targets are still with us. We still

have this ridiculous discrepancy between the rich and the poor.

People still feel, as people did in his time, that Charles Dickens

speaks for us. Please. Please, sir, I want some more. What? What?

asked for more. We are human beings and the level of sadness and

tragedy loss which played out so much in his novels are still things

that we can identify with today and his characters are so complex and

strange and fantastic. His stories tug at the heartstrings and we love

things that to put our hearts. -- HE SCREAMS. Keep still or I will

cut your throat. It is the life in his books, the raging, torrential

gusts of comedy and terrible black, black tragedy in his books. It is

that dynamism that I think, it really is like you open a Dickens

novel almost anywhere and the energy is pouring off the page at