What would Charles Dickens write today?

Some of you may have heard (I’m sure you have) that 2012 marks Charles Dickens’s 200th birthday! Britain and the whole world are preparing to celebrate this extraordinary occasion with many different events (check Dickens 2012 for more details). It’s fascinating to think about what Charles Dickens would have written in the XX and XXI Century, among the tragedies of the two World Wars, the economic booms and the economic crises, the fall of the Berlin wall and the Soviet Union (also its rise). But, to be fair, the wondering starts not too far from Charles Dickens’s death in 1870. His last novel “The Mystery Of Edwin Drood” has in fact no official ending and the novel remained unfinished, leaving the reader to wonder its mysteries and the development of the plot (a new adaptation of this book is to be aired by BBC 2 on January 10th). Apparently, the two-part BBC movie is to unveil one possible ending, investigated by historians and critics through a series of clues Charles Dickens might have left behind.

But let’s not stop at that! Let’s go further with our minds. Charles Dickens died at a very crucial time in the history of mankind. The Victorian era was already considered as a time of change, but that was just a preview of what was going to come. One would think that World War I was going to play a very important part in Charles Dickens’s novels and would probably trigger the creation of a masterpiece on class division and its contrasts. Characters would ride on a rollercoaster of mysteries, intrigues and misunderstandings only to find themselves facing the horrors of war and the challenge it would put in putting all kind of social classes on the same level. How about today? What would he write today? I think we might already have an answer for that. Charles Dickens was writing in such transcendental way one would easily claim his works to be timeless and ageless and he continues to inspire hordes of writers, being more influential and inspiring than ever. Even today, at (almost) 200.

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