Happy Birthday Charlie Dickens

It's Charles Dickens' Day today, 200 years since the date of his birth, and to celebrate we should all be clinking tankards of foaming ale in smoky hostelries, re-reading Oliver Twist and embarking on improbable romps around Southwark. Sadly, it's a bloody Tuesday and there's no time for Victorian jackanapes. Instead I've had an extra helping of homemade gruel for lunch as a small tribute to one of my favourite writers.

Of course, back in the times when most words had at least one unnecessary 'e' at the end, 'Dickens Day' was a monthly occasion. The great man was published in serial form, which made his work alive in a way we can barely conceive of; like DC and Marvel merged into one and enrolled into Mensa. Avid readers would fight their way through the bustling streets of foggy London, through the fug of burning braziers, crowds of soot-blackened urchins and other Victorian cliches I've picked up from BBC costume dramas, to buy the latest instalment of the great man's work.

They probably trudged a little more wearily to collect the final chunks of Hard Times* than, say, Pip's marshland terrors in Great Expectations or the rollicking climax to David Copperfield, but you-pays-your-ha'penny and all that. These days, comic-book fans can surely relate to the thrill of anticipation, the expectation of new twists and turns awaiting them, even if Dickens' superheroes were mostly portly solicitors whose superpowers involved eating enormous amounts of cheese.

Great Expectations (1946)

I loved Google's tribute to him today which assembles some of his most famous creations. A mutton-chopped Avengers.


Look, there's Tiny Tim, Scrooge and Professor Chuzzlebuster! Chestnuts for all! Happy birthday, sir.

* Unlike David Copperfield, Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, Hard Times was actually published weekly. Dickens' distributed it through his own Household Words mag, a kind of Guardian without the snark, between April and August 1854.