Feb. 7, 2012

The great English novelist Charles Dickens was born on this day, February 7, in 1812. The 200th anniversary of the birth of the author of A Christmas Carol and so many other classics is being celebrated worldwide. The first global celebrity author, Charles Dickens chronicled the modern industrial city and its painful inequalities. His biographer Claire Tomalin notes, “You only have to look around our society and everything he wrote about in the 1840′s is still relevant. The great gulf between the rich and poor, corrupt financiers, corrupt Members of Parliament . . . You name it, he said it.”

At a service at Westminster Abbey in London, Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, laid a wreath at the author’s grave in the Poets’ Corner.  Attended by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and a number of Dickens’s descendants, the service included a reading from Great Expectations by the American actress Gillian Anderson. Anderson had played Miss Havisham in a recent BBC adaptation of the novel. Actor Ralph Fiennes read from Bleak House, the story of a lawsuit that consumes whole generations of a single family.

Charles Dickens, the most famous English writer of his time, enchanted audiences with dramatic readings from his novels. The Dickens Fellowship, London

At a simultaneous event in Portsmouth, England, where Dickens was born, Dickens biographer Simon Callow read from David Copperfield, the coming-of-age story of an orphan whose travails are not dissimilar to Dickens’s own. Also at St Mary’s Church in Portsmouth, actress Sheila Hancock read from Oliver Twist, the story of another orphan who falls into the clutches of the villainous Bill Sikes and Fagin.

Elsewhere around the world, Dickens’s fans staged 24-hour “readathons” in 66 countries from Albania to Zimbabwe. This international event began in Australia with a reading of Dombey and Son. It will end in the United Arab Emirates with an excerpt from The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens’s last work, left unfinished when he died in 1870 at age 58.

Additional World Book articles

• A Tale of Two Cities
• Hard Times
• Nicholas Nickleby
• United Kingdom (The Victorian Age (1840′s-about 1900)