Dickensblog

Of all the teenagers who had trouble tackling Dickens in school, would you believe one of them was his own great-great-grandson?

"At school we'd studied Oliver Twist, and I just hated it," Gerald Dickens told me in a phone interview yesterday. "I must have been 14, 15, something like that." Here they were wading through this novel that "seemed to last forever, and all of the other people in the class kind of stared at me like it was my fault."

But a lot has changed since then. I was interviewing Mr. Dickens, an accomplished actor, producer, and director, about his one-man touring performance of A Christmas Carol, which, as you know, I'll be seeing next month. After that inauspicious introduction to his famous ancestor, I was curious about how he came to embrace his Dickensian heritage.

"That change had happened . . . in the early '80s," Mr. Dickens said, when the Royal Shakespeare Company did its eight-hour production of Nicholas Nickleby, and all the Dickens relatives were invited to see it. "I could think of nothing worse than having to spend eight hours watching Dickens," he recalled, "until I went and started watching it, and suddenly it all made sense." He found himself loving the "theatricality" of it all, the "humor, terror, pathos," and of course the wonderful characters.

So when he was approached in 1993 to do a reading of A Christmas Carol for charity, the way that his great-great-grandfather used to do, he didn't react with outright horror and loathing. But he was still wary. As an actor, he said, "I very much wanted to do my own thing," and he also feared being seen as "cashing in on the name."

His ultimate decision to do the reading was "completely against my better judgment," he said, laughing. "I really didn't want anything to do with performing Dickens at all. . . . I sort of decided [to do it] because it was going to be for charity and it was going to be a one-off."

And then, unexpectedly, he had "such a great time" that he's been doing it ever since. "That's fate, I suppose."

In the sixteen years since then, the reading has evolved into more of
an actual performance in which Mr. Dickens acts out all the characters. "It just became a very easy thing to do," he said, and great fun for him. The best thing about performing A Christmas Carol, he said, is that "everybody knows the plot. . . . So as an actor I haven't really got to worry about storytelling. I can concentrate purely on the different characters or the emotion of the scene or the atmosphere."

As far as the characters go, he feels he's had a lot of help: "All the work was done for me" by Charles Dickens himself. When reading descriptions like "a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner," the current Mr. Dickens can feel the character come to life right there on the page.

"The challenge of it," he said, "is showing Scrooge's progression from beginning to end." He has a problem with interpretations that show Scrooge only coming around near the end, because he's terrified by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. "The story doesn't work like that; it's got to be chipping away little by little . . . until the end." His other great challenge, he reported, is not getting "carried away" by the sheer fun of it all!

We also discussed the new Disney film a little. He plans to go this Friday and is "looking forward to seeing it."

Of course, I had to ask what his favorite Dickens book is. "My dad told me that this would be a question I'd be asked and I would never have the answer to!" he said. He's fond of so many different things about the different books that it's hard to pick just one. He loves David Copperfield for its autobiographical elements, and Nicholas Nickleby (which he's also performed as a one-man show) for its theatricality and because it's the book that really "started it all" for him. For "the complete package," he has to go with Great Expectations, which has "a bit of everything in it."

"The one I've really discovered this year is The Mystery of Edwin Drood," he said. In fact, he's currently toying with the idea of making that one into a show. When I asked him how he would handle the ending, he only quipped that a one-man show of A Tale of Two Cities, if he should get around to doing that one, would have a similar problem!

But for the moment, he's concentrating on his Christmas Carol tour. Like Scrooge, this Dickens descendant has come a very long way — from the student who hated his ancestor's works, to the actor who believes that the opportunity to perform those works is "the best thing that ever happened" to his career.

You can go to Gerald Dickens's website to learn more about his shows and also about the new series of Dickens audiobooks that he's doing.