ABSTRACT
The characters in each of Charles Dickens’s novels belong to that work alone. Each novel, from The Pickwick Papers to the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood, has its own cast and range of settings – its distinctive “world.” But what if these worlds did overlap, creating a larger “Dickensian” universe in which characters might meet and jointly create new shared storylines? The result would go beyond Dickens and might be “Dickensian,” but would it be Dickens? As if to test this proposition, BBC Television commissioned a unique drama series in 2015, which drew on the popular dramatic skills of one of Britain’s most experienced television scriptwriters and “showrunners,” to create a “Dickensian” universe across a twenty-part series.
