Why Dickens?

What explains Dickens’s popularity? What makes him so attractive to biographers and readers? Why has his work been adapted for TV and film more often than that of any other novelist? And why was it Dickens who won lasting fame rather than one of his now forgotten contemporaries? In the year of Dickens’s bicentenary, John Bowen and Robert Douglas-Fairhurst discuss the secrets of his success.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is Fellow and Tutor in English at Magdalen College, Oxford. He is the author of Becoming Dickens (Harvard UP, 2011), which won the 2011 Duff Cooper Prize, and Victorian Afterlives (OUP, 2002), and has also produced editions of Dickens's Christmas stories, Great Expectations, and Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor. He writes regularly for publications including the Daily Telegraph, TLS, New Statesman and Art Newspaper. Radio and television appearances include Start the Week and The Culture Show, and he has also acted as the historical consultant on BBC productions of Jane Eyre, Emma and Great Expectations. He lives in Oxford.

John Bowen is Professor of nineteenth-century literature in the University of York's Department of English and Related Literature.

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