By Pete Jeary , NBC News
Peter Jeary / NBC News
A bust of Charles Dickens in the author's former home in London, now a museum.
LONDON ?�Having fallen victim to a pickpocket on my journey through London�this morning,�it feels�curiously appropriate that Tuesday marks the�bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens.� The great chronicler of Victorian England's underworld would probably have been amused�? and literally inspired�? as I was adroitly parted from my cell phone.
As the country tips its collective hat to celebrate his 200th birthday ? Prince Charles is leading ceremonies by laying a wreath on the writer's grave and actor Ralph Fiennes will give�a reading, among other notable events�? I wonder why�does this most "modern"�crime�feel so immediately "Dickensian" in nature? Why do the settings, such as the workhouse�of�Oliver Twist, and characters, such as Ebenezer Scrooge, which Dickens drew in word portraits, still resonate today?
I believe the answer lies in the fact that millions in the English-speaking world ? and�countless more who don't speak English as a first language ? are able to conjure up a name, plot or title for something associated with Charles Dickens. But here's the rub ?�it is the transformation of his work into other media that has fuelled this ubiquity.
Peter Jeary / NBC News
Billboard for an 1837 theatrical production based on 'The Pickwick Papers.'
At my�English elementary school,�our rare cultural day-trips�were reserved for worthy matters.� In one case, there was a trip�to the movie theater to see a black-and-white screening of Great Expectations, which�opens in the bleak�landscape of the Kent marshes.�
Just�a few years later, Lionel Bart's stage-musical-turned-Academy-Award-winning Oliver! transported me to an equally strange Technicolor world, where Victorian London encountered the Swinging Sixties.�
The start and end of my teenage years were marked, like solid wooden bookends holding up a shelf-full of Dickens books, by Smike (a musical TV adaptation from Nicholas Nickleby) and Nicholas Nickleby itself ? an eight-hour stage epic, in two parts, written by David Edgar and�produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Google pays tribute to Dickens with a special 'doodle'
And so it�transpired that I felt like�an expert in Dickens, without ever having read a word.� The Jeary family volume of A Christmas Carol remained unopened for many years, apart from the well-thumbed pages with illustrations.
Peter Jeary / NBC News
Dickens acting the part of Captain Bobadil in an amateur production, portrayed in an engraving of an 1846 painting by C.R. Leslie.
To a large degree,�the blame must lie with Dickens himself.� He was a keen�amateur actor, and adored his staged readings and lecture tours. His work was so "theatrical" it was�often�pirated�? illicitly�transformed into a stage rendition before the serialization was complete.�
The plots and settings are�quintessentially�cinematic�? there are around 100�known�movies dating from�the silent-movie era�based on Dickens'�novels.� He is also, without question, one of greatest�authors of flawed characters in English literature.�
As the Archbishop of Canterbury said at Tuesday's service at Westminster Abbey to honor Dickens, "the figures we remember most readily from his works are the great grotesques.� We have, we think, never met anyone like them ? and then we think again."�
And so�it was inevitable that Miss Havisham, Smallweed and Sir Leicester Dedlock would creep in to the common psyche, as the TV mini-series became the modern-day literary periodical.
These media transformations�produce incredible interest in Dickens and his literature.� The London Museum has�a special Dickens exhibition that's proving hugely popular and the line for the Charles Dickens Museum�? right around the corner from the NBC London bureau��? ran out the passage and down the street (the fact they were offering free birthday cupcakes may have had something to do with it).
Peter Jeary / NBC News
A bookcase in the author's London home, now the Charles Dickens Museum.
The trouble is, as wonderful as adaptations are, they can never recreate the complexity and density of the original.� Reading Dickens is like embarking on�the trans-Siberian railway-- a marathon journey encountering multiple characters in�unfolding�landscapes.� I remember feeling punch-drunk upon�completing my first full read-through of a novel (Bleak House) and still need to be in the right frame of mind before starting a new one.
But there is something compelling and inspiring about his writing that becomes infectious. I have made my own�dismal attempt to adapt Martin Chuzzlewit�for the stage,�but it's proving hellishly difficult; so unfortunately "Pecksniff and Pinch" won't be at a theater near you anytime soon... but please keep an eye out for my cell phone.
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