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The 9 Best Documentaries About Charles Dickens

Nov 9, 2023 | Best Of , Celebrities , History

If you’re an English literature enthusiast, then you probably already know the name Charles Dickens. He was a legendary author who wrote some of the greatest works in literature, such as Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. But did you know that there have been numerous documentaries made about his life, work, and influence? Here are some of the best documentaries available to watch right now that will give you an insight into the world of Charles Dickens. From archival footage to interviews with experts, these documentaries will make you appreciate this literary genius even more. Dive in and get ready to explore one of the greatest minds of all time!

1. Charles Dickens documentary

Charles Dickens’ life is a story of triumph over hardship. Although he had very few formal education opportunities, he became one of the most beloved authors in the English language and an international literary icon. Explore his fascinating life through these thought-provoking documentaries. The first documentary to feature Charles Dickens is ‘Great Expectations’, which chronicles his rise from poverty to fame and his literary success. It shows the struggles he faced in getting published, as well as his initial lack of recognition. The film also examines the impact that Dickens’ work had on Victorian England, and how it still resonates today.

2. Charles Dickens: The Man That Asked for More [Full Movie]

Welcome to the world of Charles Dickens, a man whose works have been enjoyed by generations since his lifetime. This documentary, titled ‘The Man That Asked for More’, takes us on a journey through his life and works in a captivating and insightful way. We get an inside look into the creative mind of one of history’s most prolific authors as we explore the themes

3. Dickens: The Last Decade

Charles Dickens is one of the most renowned and celebrated authors of all time. His works include such classics as Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, and Oliver Twist. With his vivid imagery and memorable characters, he has captivated generations of readers for centuries. But what do we know about the last decade of Charles Dickens’ life? For this, we turn to the documentary “Dickens: The Last Decade”. This film looks at Dickens’ later years and examines how his work was influenced by personal events. It takes viewers on a journey of discovery into the life of one of England’s greatest authors.

4. Charles Dickens | The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1947) Full Film, subtitles

Charles Dickens is a world-renowned author whose works have been adapted into multiple forms of media, from stage plays and feature films to documentaries. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1947) Full Film is one of the most iconic adaptations of his beloved novel. This documentary dives deep into the life and times of Charles Dickens, exploring his childhood, struggles.

5. The Murder Case That Inspired Charles Dickens | Murder Maps | Real Crime

One of the most enduringly popular novelists in English literature, Charles Dickens was also inspired by true stories. One such story is that of the unsolved murder case which became known as “The Road Hill House Mystery” and which has been immortalized in a documentary from the Real Crime series called Murder Maps.

6. The Hero of My Life – Charles Dickens (1970)

Life Without Dickens – Charles Dickens: A Life of Creativity (1972)A film made to commemorate the centennial anniversary of Charles Dickens’ death in 1870, this documentary is a must-watch for anyone interested in learning more about one of Britain’s most famous and beloved authors. Featuring interviews with renowned scholars and critics, as well as archival footage.

7. Charles Dickens and the Invention of Christmas 1 320×240 2 00M h 264

Christmas has become an integral part of our celebrations throughout the year and it would be hard to imagine life without it. But did you know that many of its traditions were actually invented by Charles Dickens? The Best Documentaries About Charles Dickens is a must-see for anyone looking to gain insights into how this beloved author shaped Christmas as we know it today.

8.  A Visit To Charles Dickens’ Kitchen | A Cook Back In Time

Take a journey into the past with A Visit To Charles Dickens’ Kitchen! This documentary takes you back to the early 19th century, when Charles Dickens was working on some of his most famous works. Featuring interviews with historians and scholars, this documentary allows viewers to get an in-depth look at what life was like for Dickens as he cooked in his kitchen..

9.Scrooge | A Christmas Carol and Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens is one of the world’s most beloved authors and literary geniuses. His works have stood the test of time, captivating audiences for centuries with their wit and wisdom. Scrooge | A Christmas Carol is a perfect example of this timeless classic, which has been adapted into multiple films and television productions over the past several decades.

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Charles Dickens Documentary

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Wide angle reviews, interviews and opinion on music, travel and the arts by writer Graham Reid

Peter ackroyd, dickens biographer, interviewed (1991): the big life in small details.

Graham Reid  |  Aug 22, 2008  |  8 min read

It was an afternoon in June 1846 when Charles Dickens finally broke the writing block which had been troubling him.

It had been two years since his previous novel, but these last weeks walking in the hills of Switzerland above Lausanne had allowed him to sketch out the framework of a book.

In his study overlooking the lake, Dickens – a man of curious personal superstition who preferred to be away from London on the publication of any new work – took out a copy of Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, randomly pointed to the printed page and read: “What a work is likely to turn out! Let us begin it!”

And so prompted, he began what was to become Dombey and Son , published in monthly parts from October through to April 1848.

Yet in this writing, as with many of this works, his own life imposed itself. While working on the eighth instalment back in London, Dickens was thrown by a horse and was so shocked by the incident which occasioned “a nervous seizure of the throat” that he travelled to Brighton to recuperate and work on the next part of the book – a novel in which Mr Dombey is thrown from a horse and kicked senseless.

That Dickens wrote much of himself into his books is a view shared by all his biographers, yet Peter Ackroyd exhaustive new analysis, Dickens , scrupulously pursues the idea as it unearths and sifts the minutiae of the writer’s life. For a man of considerable self-discipline and meticulous order, “who ran his life like a military campaign,” Ackroyd says, this was Dickens’ way of controlling the world.

“Dickens was a man who found it very difficult to distinguish between fiction and reality,” says Ackroyd from his London home. “Throughout his life he interpreted events in terms of his fictional imperatives.

To write in such a detail Ackroyd has produced a book of closely reasoned analysis, solid research, but much speculation. And, inevitably, considerable bulk. The size sometimes obscures the scholarship.

“Peter Ackroyd’s leviathan of a biography runs to 1195 pages, tips the scales at 3lb 12oz and quantitatively and qualitatively gobbles up its rivals (none of them exactly minnows)," wrote Peter Davalle in the Times Saturday Review.

“Down they go into the belly of the Ackroyd whale; the lives of Dickens by E. M. Forster, Una Pope-Hennessy, Angus Wilson, Percy Fitzgerald...” And so on.

When faced with such notable and thorough predecessors, why Ackroyd should have set himself such an undertaking is difficult to fathom. Especially one which, by general critical consensus, reveals so little new about its subject. Yet it is also a controversial work.

In seven, very short, sections Ackroyd interpolates an imaginary meeting between Little Dorrit and Dickens, includes a dream he [Ackroyd] had about the writer and interviews himself about the difficulties of writing such a book.

He also engineers a discussion between Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Chatterton and T. S. Eliot, all writers Ackroyd written about in the past either in novelisations (Chatterton) or conventional biography (the Eliot won the Whitbread Prize for best biography published in 1984).

Some of the interpolations are undeniably clever. The exchange between Chatterton and Wilde allows this lovely piece of imaginary Wildean wit:

Chatterton: All around is anarchy and artifice and –

Wilde: Alliteration?

And later in the same sequence Dickens wishes William Blake (the English artist, writer and visionary who spoke to angels) would join them. Chatterton says he will be along shortly – and sure enough, Ackroyd’s new biography now being researched is about Blake. Cute perhaps, but harmless enough. Other sections offer fewer pleasures.

“I do not mind these interpolations,” wrote Ferdinand Mount in a largely favourable review in the Spectator, “except for the penultimate one, where Ackroyd has a rambling conversation with himself which is both banal and self-indulgent. When a biographer starts telling us he uses files and card boxes and indices we can only say: we don’t wish to know that, kindly leave the stage.”

Ackroyd simply says he wanted to write a very different kind of literary biography and notes that the revival in literary biographies of recent years has run parallel to a revival in literary fiction – to which he himself has contributed with Chatterton and The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde.

“Every biography is conditional and reflects the conditions of its time. Those interpolations would strike some people as post-modern and playing around with perspectives and in the future will be seen as part of this period.

“You can never really escape the condition of your time so you might as well embrace them and use the properly.

“When I had finished the very straight biography I knew there was something missing. I went on holiday and those passages occurred to me one after the other. I had no conscious control over them as it were – or even over the whole work.

“Although I separate fiction and biography I don’t think there’s much difference in the composition of the two.”

Ackroyd’s equal and prolific command of the genres of fiction and biography drew Anne Constable in Time to note that “no new biography of Charles Dickens should go unnoticed, especially when the writer is Peter Ackroyd, one of the most amusing and acclaimed young novelists on the British literary scene. Like Dickens, Ackroyd finds rest more exhausting than labour. He turned out two novels, Chatterton and First Light, during the five years he was working on the biography.

Busy, yes – and Ackroyd also started young. At eight he wrote a drama about Guy Fawkes.

Born into a working class family in East Acton, London in 1949, he studied English at Cambridge and later went to Yale University.

In 1973 he was literary editor of the Spectator and by 1977 its managing editor. In 1983 he quit to become a full-time novelist and biographer.

Ironically, he says he didn’t seriously read any Dickens until he left university. His first novel, The Great Fire of London , was about trying to make a film of Little Dorrit and his reading of that novel spurred his interest in the rest of Dickens’ fiction.

When he was a child his grandmother inculcated a sense of Dickens’ world into him as she took around “the darker, more ancient aspects of London which have a flavour and still linger today.” As a Londoner himself and a writer, the novelist cast a long shadow over him he says, but it was “as a presence rather than as in author” he says.

“When I sat down to write the biography I wanted to come to terms with that presence. My grandmother passed on impressions of an overwhelming sense of antiquity of the city and she was of that last generation to come from those conditions, the generation which would have thought of him as a realistic writer who spoke to them and their generation. They never lost contact with that vision he had given them of their lives.

“Dickens’ genius was to be the first urban novelist who knew London and make it the centre of his fiction.

“It is difficult to imagine any English speaking/English writing novelist who has the same capaciousness and breadth as he had, who combined comedy with pathos, theatricality with tragedy, symbolism with realism. That is a unique achievement – but he also came at the beginnings of modern techniques in printing and the growth of the middle-class audience which encouraged him. None of that can happen in quite the same way again.”

By taking as his brief placing the writer in the total milieu of his time. Ackroyd says self-discipline is a requirement for him to work. His day begins at 6 am. He diligently writes 1000 words a day (“a steady momentum is indispensable, persistence one of the most important qualities”) and prefers to run his fiction writing parallel to biographical research so he doesn’t go stale on either.

Writing is for mornings, afternoons for research and evenings for relaxation watching American soaps and quiz shows on television.

He has taken to television himself to promote both Hawksmoor and Dickens on The South Bank Show. He admits he is enjoying book promotion more and more although “it is a terrible suspension of activity to take two months off.”

When promoting Dickens he took a notebook with him to scribble out longhand ideas for his present novel project, although he obviously prefers to work in one of his two studies at his homes in London and Devon where he has identical word processors.

“I opened a bookshop recently but I don’t think I’ve kissed any babies,” he laughs. “I certainly like going into bookshops and meeting people at the rough end of the trade. It would be absurd of me to wash my hands of that and I was frankly delighted when Dickens sold a lot of copies.

“I was worried about the book. Not reviews, but sales because it was important for Sinclair-Stevenson that it was a success. Fortunately it worked fairly well from the beginning.”

That is an understatement; Dickens has been one of the publishing success stories of last year in Britain selling over 60,000 copies in the first fortnight. And that on a book with a cover price of $64.

John Lyon, sales director for publishers Sinclair-Stevenson, still sounded genuinely excited by the success of Dickens as he counted off sales figures and retailer reactions when he visited Auckland last month.

Here to meet with his company’s local distributors, Lyon concedes Dickens was “a dream start, a fluke” for a company only launched by old Etonian and former Hamish Hamilton editor Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson on September 3 last year.

When Sinclair-Stevenson quit to found his own company many of the authors he had encouraged (Ackroyd, William Boyd and Paul Theroux among them) followed him. Sinclair-Stevenson quickly raised initial capital of $7.7m and paid authors generous advances. Ackroyd was given $2.1 million for Dickens and his forthcoming Blake biography.

And Dickens was a literary publicist’s dream. Divergent reviews raised the profile of the author and the work. Anthony Burgess in the Independent praised the book “without reservation.” Eric Griffith in the Sunday Correspondent throughout it fat and dreary.

While the book may tell little new about Dickens – although no other biography brings such a wealth of information together in one place – Ackroyd does suggest that Dickens’ relationship with the young actress Ellen Ternan, for whom he left his wife and family and lived off and on with for many years, was chaste.

No previous biographer has suggested that and indeed a new book by Claire Tomlin, The Invisible Woman , a biography of Ternan, again advances the traditionally held view of the pair being partners.

“I don’t think it matters one way or the other whether he had sex with her or not,” Ackroyd says. “The truth is he had an obsessive relationship which lasted for many years. Whether it was sexual or not is beside the point.

“There is no doubt it was a very strange relationship and he seemed to be doing what he did throughout his life in times of crisis or emotional trauma. He would reach for his fiction to help him understand reality and his novels you have a recurring image of the idealised young virgin in a platonic relationship with an older man.

"There is no doubt in my mind that was the relationship he formed with Ellen Terman."

Also by Peter Ackroyd, his study of Venice .

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• How Charles Dickens’ <i>A Christmas Carol</i> Changed the Way the Holiday Is Celebrated

How Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol Changed the Way the Holiday Is Celebrated

I n a world in which Christmas is widely celebrated as the most wonderful time of the year, the new movie The Man Who Invented Christmas , out Wednesday, might seem to be pure fantasy. The story, which centers around the journey that led English author Charles Dickens to creating A Christmas Carol in 1843, starts in a world in which Christmas is hardly a worthy subject for a novel.

The film explores how, following a series of flops, Dickens was ready to give up his career as a writer when inspiration struck him in the form of a Christmas tale — and how he inadvertently ended up changing the way Britain celebrated the festival forever. But how faithful is the movie, which stars Beauty and the Beast actor Dan Stevens as Dickens, to the real events that took place?

It’s certainly true that prior to A Christmas Carol , Christmas was a decidedly second-rate holiday in Great Britain, compared even to Boxing Day . At one time, it had been known as a lively pagan festival, for which people dressed up in costumes, but the rise of the Puritans in the mid-17th century led to a crackdown on the holiday and the licentious behavior associated with it.

The festival fell out of favor, except in little pockets of the countryside — including the rural area where Dickens lived as a young boy before his family moved to London. Here, Dickens experienced a snowy Christmas every December 25, which presumably influenced his decision to make Christmas Day in A Christmas Carol a white one, a detail that helped establish snowy weather as the image of an ideal Christmas in the U.K., a notion that still exists today.

However, despite Christmas’ enduring popularity in rural areas, Easter remained the main church holiday and Boxing Day the main winter holiday in Britain.

When Dickens pitched a Christmas book to his publishers, they couldn’t understand why anyone would be interested in the idea. But the author had predicted a turn in the yuletide. Queen Victoria had recently married the German Prince Albert, who brought the Christmas tree over from Germany, and the idea of the festival being a time for family and celebration was gradually seeping back into public consciousness.

The publication and instant popularity of A Christmas Carol became part of a series of factors that helped raise Christmas’ status over the course of that decade. “Dickens had no notion of what the festival would become today, but he was clearly onto something,” Les Standiford, who wrote the book on which the movie is based, told TIME. “He even went on to write four more Christmas books but none were even nearly as successful as A Christmas Carol .”

As the movie explores, Dickens was not only popular in Britain but in the United States too, which is why A Christmas Carol generated excitement over the festival across the pond too. However, as The Man Who Invented Christmas lightly touches upon, Dickens’ tour of the U.S. in the early 1840s, on the back of the success of novels such as Oliver Twist , did not go so well. “He was very excited about his U.S. tour; he knew that he had thousands of American readers and an appetite for his books was very lively,” said Standiford. “However, when he got over there, he found it far rougher than he was used to in England.”

Despite the failure of his first tour, Dickens returned to the U.S. for a reading tour in the late 1860s, following the enormous popularity of A Christmas Carol overseas. “The tour was a resounding success for all,” said Standiford.

Although the movie accurately reflects the way Dickens’ novel helped spur a revival of the celebration of Christmas, some major plot points are the product of dramatic license. For instance, Tara, Dickens’ children’s nursemaid, is an entirely fictional character, introduced “to remind Dickens of his responsibilities in the world,” Canadian writer and actor Susan Coyne, who adapted Standiford’s book for the big screen, told TIME. Dickens’ initial intention to kill off the character of Tiny Tim before the end of A Christmas Carol is similarly invented.

Additionally, it is unclear whether Dickens ever threw his seemingly incorrigible father out of the family home, as seen in the movie. “I don’t know if that literal exchange took place, but I do think Dickens eventually made peace with his father,” said Standiford. “It’s impossible to miss the correspondences between the plot of A Christmas Carol and Dickens’ relationship with his family and father. I would go far as to say that, in a way, Ebenezer Scrooge is a direct manifestation from Dickens’ fraught relationship with his father.”

What is somewhat surprising is that Dickens did see his characters appear before him as though they were real, fully-formed human beings — as seen in the movie with his creations such as Scrooge (portrayed by Christopher Plummer) and Tiny Tim. “Through my research, I learned that he used to talk about his characters as though they were what he called ‘the children of his fancy,'” said Coyne. “Even when he was not working, he’d feel them tugging on his sleeve saying ‘time to get back to work.'”

And the movie does provide viewers with a fairly accurate sense of how Dickens successfully changed the way Christmas is celebrated.

“Before A Christmas Carol , you’d never ask questions about the meaning of Christmas, and we now ask it all the time,” said Coyne. “I think that’s because of what Dickens’ book suggests. It has this magical idea that in spite of all our differences, we can make something good happen — something which, in this day and age, it’s important to remind ourselves of.”

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A Double Life; A Life of Fiction

By Jane Smiley

• Dec. 3, 2000

Charles Dickens was traveling home from France on June 10, 1865, when the train he was riding in went off the tracks while crossing a bridge. Seven first-class carriages dropped into the river below. The eighth, Dickens's own, dangled off the bridge, hanging from its coupling and throwing the Dickens party into the lower corner of the carriage. Dickens calmed his companions and then clambered onto the bridge. He found a conductor, obtained a key to the carriage and freed his friends. Then he filled his top hat with water, took out his brandy flask and went about succoring, and in at least one case, rescuing, those trapped in the wrecked cars below. Men and women died in front of him. He helped others find their own dead loved ones. He was, to use a possibly Dickensian word, indefatigable.

When all that could be done for the victims had been done, Dickens, 53 years old and not in very good health, climbed back into the dangling carriage and retrieved from the pocket of his coat the installment of ''Our Mutual Friend'' that he had just completed and was taking to his publishers.

The author, who in the course of his journalistic and novelistic career had never shrunk from describing the lurid and the terrible, made no effort to describe what he had seen. Three days after the accident, he wrote to a friend, ''I have a -- I don't know what to call it -- constitutional (I suppose) presence of mind, and was not in the least fluttered at the time. But in writing these scanty words of recollection I feel the shake and am obliged to stop.'' He also refused to appear at the subsequent inquest, or to advertise his presence on the ill-fated train in any way.

Why did Dickens hide his heroism? Because the author's traveling companions were his 25-year-old mistress, Ellen Ternan, and her mother. Charles Dickens, who wrote more than a dozen lengthy works of fiction and many shorter stories, thousands of letters, myriad essays, articles and speeches, several plays, an autobiographical fragment and God knows what else, was one of the great secret-keepers of his age. That Dickens -- a media star and the first real celebrity in the modern mold -- was able to survive unexposed should come as no surprise. The press had not, by 1860, perfected its machinery for exposing the lives of public people. What is really interesting is that a man whose volume of writings approach logorrhea could dissemble his most intimate concerns and feelings so consistently for so long.

Ellen Ternan was just one in a long line of Dickensian secrets. Although most people today, if they know one thing about Dickens, know that as a boy he was sent to work in a boot-blacking factory, and although as an adult, he could not pass the former site of the factory, in the Strand, without weeping, Dickens was so secretive about this that a year or so before his death, he mystified his grown children during a family game by using the clue ''Warrens' Blacking, 30, Strand.'' Even his daughters, with whom he was close, had no idea what he was talking about.

In fact, the man we know today, through biography, is entirely unlike the man known to his contemporaries, who inferred a certain ''ungentlemanliness'' (in the strict Victorian sense of not having the proper birth and educational credentials) from Dickens's often flashy mode of dress and taste for spectacle and theater. They never knew, though, that the author's father went to debtors' prison, that his grandparents were servants and that his maternal grandfather left England after embezzling money in 1810. Observers sometimes considered him odd, even mad, and almost everyone remarked upon his amazing vitality, penetrating gaze and enormous personal force, but Dickens prevented his contemporaries from filling in the narrative and accounting for his unusual qualities.

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Charles Dickens Movies

1. Our Mutual Friend

2. Our Mutual Friend

3. Mystery of Edwin Drood

4. The Mystery of Edwin Drood

5. The Mystery of Edwin Drood

6. Great Expectations

7. Great Expectations

8. Great Expectations

9. Great Expectations

10. David Copperfield

11. David Copperfield

12. Masterpiece Theatre: Bleak House

13. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby

14. Dombey & Son

15. Dombey and Son

16. Hard Times

17. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby

18. Nicholas Nickleby

19. nicholas nickleby, 20. nicholas nickleby.

21. A Tale of Two Cities

22. A Tale of Two Cities

23. A Tale of Two Cities

24. A Tale of Two Cities

25. Dickens

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