Tomorrow is the bi-centenary of Charles Dickens’s birth, and Fleet Street’s literary editors devoted much of their weekend pages to man who called himself ‘the Inimitable’.
Penguin has run a poll on the nation’s favourite Dickens character; the Guardian reports that the winner is Ebenezer Scrooge, who saw off the likes of Pip, Fagin, Sydney Carton and Miss Havisham. Scrooge’s story is one of redemption. I can’t improve on the Spectator’s original review of A Christmas Carol, which said:
‘In short, the grasping, grudging money-muck, is transformed into a merry-faced, open-handed, warm-hearted old fellow.’
You might have expected one of Dickens’s arch-villains to top a public poll — Fagin or Sikes, Steerforth or Uriah Heep, Tulkinghorn, even Gradgrind. So Scrooge’s victory is rather heartening. God bless us, every one — as Tiny Tim would have said.
Meanwhile, Claire Tomalin (Dickens’s biographer) has fired a salvo at ‘dreadful television’.
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