A new BBC drama puts disparate Dickens characters together in Victorian London
“It was a good thing to have a couple of thousand people all rigid and frozen together, in the palm of one’s hand,” Dickens once wrote about books. Now his own rigid, frozen characters are getting a new life on the TV screen in BBC’s 20-part series Dickensian, which started filming this week in a West London studio. The show takes various Dickens characters from different stories and plunks them together in Victoria-era London; think the Avengers gang visiting Penny Dreadful. Ebenezer Scrooge, Fagin, and Miss Havisham consort on an elaborate set mimicking a cobbled London high street, complete with The Old Curiosity Shop, the fully functional Three Cripples Pub, and Fagin’s Den down an alley.