(Gyles) From the epic sweep of the Yorkshire moors... (Johnny) This is the landscape that sits at the heart of the Brontë story.

(Gyles) ...to the cobbled sprawl of Victorian London...

I can just imagine Dickens walking down this very street.

(Gyles) ...and the jagged beauty of the Jurassic coast... Talk about a cliffhanger.

(peppy music) ...join me, Gyles Brandreth, as I travel the country to uncover the real life stories... Go on, I'm liking the goss.

...and places... -But where are we now?

-We're in Mad Mary's room.

(Gyles) Good grief, that is amazing.

...that inspired some of our most famous authors.

Charles Dickens, the Brontë sisters, Thomas Hardy, and Jane Austen.

(woman) We have Jane Austen's writing table.

(Gyles) Wow!

With the help of some friends... -Ah!

-Good afternoon.

...I'll unlock the secrets behind their unforgettable novels... Oh, I love it.

...delve into their lives... (whipping) ...and uncover the true life events that inspired some of the greatest stories ever told.

-The sale of a wife.

-Oh.

This is literally detective work.

They may be gone, but their tales live on, brought to our TV and cinema screens by some very familiar faces.

♪ So come with me as I discover Britain just as it was written.

They don't write them like this anymore.

♪ (birds chirping) (pensive music) London, a dazzling, dizzying metropolis backed with life, excitement, and danger.

♪ Every street has its stories, its intrigue, its drama.

From Southwark to Soho and Westminster to Whitechapel, this is the world-famous city that inspired one of Britain's greatest writers.

Charles Dickens.

(contemplative music) His stories have been adapted for TV and cinema more than any other novelist, bringing us some of fiction's most memorable characters, from Oliver Twist to Miss Havisham and the mean and miserly Scrooge.

It was the runaway success of Dickens's first novel The Pickwick Papers, published monthly throughout 1836, that established him as a master storyteller.

(upbeat music) ♪ Pickwick Papers were serialized, and then every so often they would be collected together, and Chapman and Hall, who were the publishers of Charles Dickens, all but for about 10 years of his career would put them together and bound them in leather like this.

And I am lucky enough to own a first edition, so this was published and put out as a book form like this in 1837.

And I love holding it and touching it.

(wondrous music) I live in London, and to be honest, I--you know, often there's places I go to and they're mentioned in here.

♪ (Gyles) In fact, London features in all of Dickens's major novels usually as the main setting, and many of the buildings he knew and wrote about remain with us today.

♪ From the splendor of St Paul's Cathedral, which makes an appearance in 13 books, to the hustle and bustle of The Strand, which features in 11.

But it's Westminster that features in more more novels than any other.

Not surprising, as it's here that he began his career as a parliamentary reporter.

And just a stone's throw away, is this place, Westminster Abbey, where Dickens himself was laid to rest in 1870.

By then he was rich, famous, admired across the world, the man who had created David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Ebenezer Scrooge, he was considered the greatest writer of his age.

(whimsical music) ♪ Dickens's own story began 30 miles away in Rochester, Kent, where his father worked as a clerk for the Royal Navy.

♪ He lived here until he was 10, and later described those days as the happiest of his childhood.

♪ Today many of Rochester's buildings carry plaques detailing how Dickens incorporated them into his novels.

♪ And in the nearby cemetery, you'll still find on the gravestones names that inspired some of his most memorable characters.

Dickens's affection for this place is not surprising.

At the time he lived here, his family life was secure, he loved his home, and he enjoyed his school studies.

But then, the navy decided to relocate his father's job to London, and the whole family had to move with him.

The life of order that Dickens had known was about to be replaced by chaos.

(melancholic music) Next, the plunge into poverty that brings an abrupt end to Dickens's childhood.

(Bidisha) So suddenly Dickens loses everything.

He finds himself working in a boot blacking factory, spending 10 hours a day literally pasting labels onto boot polish.

(Gyles) An inspiration for some of the greatest stories ever told.

(Russell) He's probably one of the best writers ever to have lived.

(peppy music) (Gyles) Charles Dickens came to London in 1822.

No author before or since has described the city so vividly.

(Susie) The reason I think Dickens is such a wonderful writer, well, how can you put it in one sentence?

Um, for me, of course, a lot of it is about his language.

Um, he-- he always made London his main character, and his descriptions of place are second to none.

(dramatic music) ♪ (Gyles) Today many London street signs, pub names, even shops, are all testament to Dickens's enduring influence.

♪ But the impact was two way... ♪ ...because this city affected him like nowhere else.

♪ This is the site of the Cross Keys Pub.

It's here that Dickens arrived by coach in London at the age of 11 to start his new life, just as his character Pip does in Great Expectations.

(cheerful music) The Dickens family, the parents, and at this time six children, plus a maid and a lodger, all lived here on this street in Camden, an area, Dickens described as shabby, dingy, damp, and as mean a neighborhood as one would desire to see.

♪ The original building has long since been demolished and the plaque has almost disappeared, but when Dickens knew it, the house was new built, though uncomfortably small and cramped.

And yet, on the edge of town, quite near hay fields, which was nice for a country boy, and once they had settled in here, all seemed well, but briefly, because soon their lives were turned upside down.

(mysterious music) ♪ Dickens's father had ambitions of being a gentleman, and a low-paid job in the navy was not going to stop him.

If he couldn't afford something, he'd borrow and borrow again.

♪ Trouble was he wasn't good at paying back the money.

After only a year in London, John Dickens was arrested for debt and sent to the notorious Marshelsea Prison south of the Thames.

♪ Today this wall is all that remains of the prison.

When the rest of it was torn down in 1842, Dickens wrote, "It is gone now and the world is none the worse without it."

Jerry, we're here by the wall of the old Marshelsea Prison.

What kind of a prison was it?

(Jerry) The Marshelsea Prison was the worst, meant to be the worst of the three big debtors' prisons of London.

The worst in terms of the impoverishment of its living conditions.

No allowance was paid to any of the debtors, and the worst in terms of the fact that it had the poorest debtors living in it.

(Gyles) It was clearly a grim place.

So how much debt did John Dickens actually rack up to be sent here?

(Jerry) He was sent to prison by a baker in Camden town.

Dickens owed the baker 40 pounds for-- which was a lot of money.

But he owed money all over the place, in fact.

I mean any one of a number of creditors could have put him in the Marshelsea.

But John Car of Camden Town did (solemn piano music) (Gyles) In those days, relatives of Marshelsea prisoners could move into the jail with them.

John's wife Elizabeth and four of their children did.

But not young Charles.

Well, someone in the family had to earn money.

(Bidisha) So, suddenly Dickens loses everything.

He finds himself working in a boot blacking factory, spending ten hours a day literally pasting labels onto boot polish.

It's hard labor.

It's absolutely horrible.

(John) And that goes into his novels in--with Miss Micawber in David Copperfield.

He borrows the habits, the sort of roundabout, long-winded, wonderfully wordy turns of phrase for Mr. Micawber from his father, and it--you know, it's Dickens's genius to turn what must have been terrible into something hilarious.

♪ (Gyles) In his novel David Copperfield, office clerk Mr. Micawber is thrown into debtors' prison, like Dickens's own father, and like him, he's ever hopeful that his fortunes will change, believing something will turn up.

♪ But following his release from prison, Dickens's father continued to incur debts, and the family had to constantly move house to escape creditors.

♪ (peppy music) ♪ At 15, Charles got a new job, this time as a solicitor's clerk, to help them make ends meet.

♪ Up there is the actual office where Dickens worked.

♪ For me, this is where his rise to fame began.

While here, he started to learn shorthand reporting, and that led to his career as a journalist, and from there he became a novelist.

♪ Next, Dickens enters Parliament as a reporter.

(Quentin) In which he describes brilliantly the whole circus and theater of parliament.

(Gyles) He finds love... -He looks very charming.

-He does.

-And she looks very pretty.

-Yeah.

(Gyles) ...and creates an immortal character.

(Bidisha) Oliver Twist is a very good example of a powerful social novel.

♪ (Gyles) Oliver Twist, the story of a poor orphan failed and punished by a cruel system.

(Bidisha) Oliver Twist is a very good example of a powerful, social novel.

So, you read it, and of course it's about a young boy trying to survive in the world.

It's a human story above all.

But it's also an indictment of child poverty, destitution, child exploitation, child labor, workhouses, borstals, all of the terrible places that unwanted children would find themselves in.

(dramatic music) (Gyles) As with many of his stories, Dickens used Oliver Twist to voice his contempt for people in authority.

It was an opinion formed after seeing his father jailed for debt, and a view strengthened when, at the age of 20, he got a job here.

(John) Order, order, order!

(Boris) In spite of the scoffing, in spite of the negativity, in spite of the skepticism, you all here from the other side, we will work flat out to deliver it!

(Gyles) The House of Commons.

Each day British Politicians serve up a real life slice of drama, or, as some would see it, farce.

(Boris) ...deal, and it will go into the microwave as though we've drawn agreement-- it works--it works in both devices, uh, this deal.

(laughing) (Gyles) Although, many are turned off by such scenes today, in the 19th century, millions were riveted.

Back then, politics was considered a mass entertainment.

And those who covered it for the press, the so-called parliamentary sketch writers, were household names.

(peppy music) ♪ When Dickens began his career as a parliamentary reporter in 1830, it was a time of great political and social change.

Nothing new there then.

Now of course, we have TV cameras in the Commons, but the tradition of parliamentary sketch writing is still going strong.

Quentin, you're considered the great parliamentary sketch writer of our time.

-I am certainly not.

-What was Dickens doing?

Quentin Letts has reported on Westminster for years.

...reporter, was he a sketch writer?

What was his role?

How did Dickens's job differ from his?

Parliamentary sketch writer or reporter, what was he doing?

(Quentin) He was a gallery man, a gallery reporter.

He arrived as a very young man, and he was there to give readers a report on what their MPs were saying and giving a verbatim account of what was being said.

(Gyles) And he was a reporter in the sense he was actually saying what had been said: "Mr. so-and-so said.

The reply was..." -He wasn't a commentator?

-He was not a commentator, but in addition to his newspaper stuff, he wrote a piece called A Parliamentary Sketch, in which he describes brilliantly the whole circus and theater of Parliament, and that is what Parliament is, Parliament is a theater.

It's not about policies, it's about personalities, and the way that the policies are sold by the personalities.

(Michael) The right honorable lady is a distinguished criminal barrister, and now I know what it's like to be cross examined by her.

But I also understand why lawyers are paid by the hour.

(laughing) (Quentin) And he describes not just the names of the politicians, but the way that they walk and talk, and the way that they dress.

(Gyles) And what did his time as a reporter of Parliament contribute to his fiction?

(Quentin) I think it brought to his fiction a realization of where the power happens, and the way that--the way that policies can have a bearing on poverty and on the cityscape.

But it also brought to him an awareness of characters, and--and characters-- if you look in the modern House of Commons, you can see the same sort of characters that you would've had in Dickens's day.

Human nature hasn't changed.

(dramatic music) ♪ (Gyles) Today political reporters are often accused of getting too close to the MPs they write about.

Not so Charles Dickens.

It's fair to say he didn't think much of politicians.

His books give the impression the government is in the hands of the corrupt, the stupid, and the parasitic.

His disdain for Parliament became clearer in later life when he turned down more than one invitation to become an MP himself.

♪ As his confidence as a writer grew, he began submitting short magazine stories about London life.

Wanting to use a memorable name, he signed himself Boz, the nickname of his younger brother.

At 22, Dickens got noticed.

The Morning Chronicle offered him a permanent job, enabling him to leave home and move into lodgings here at Furnivals Inn on the site in Holburn.

(elegant music) ♪ (whooshing) Things were now looking up for the young Dickens.

The Morning Chronicle had given his Sketches by Boz a much wider audience, and he was in love.

♪ He was so infatuated with Catherine Hogarth, the 19-year-old daughter of a newspaper editor, that within six months they were engaged, and within a year they were married.

♪ (quirky music) Shortly afterwards, at the age of 24, Dickens wrote The Pickwick Papers, charting the travels and adventures of retired businessman Samuel Pickwick and his friends.

It was a publishing phenomenon, spawning theatrical performances, merchandise, and even joke books.

♪ Dickens found a winning formula: Create characters your readers recognize, and then put them in places and situations you're familiar with.

(peppy music) ♪ Sold in books shops for a shilling, by the end of the monthly serialization, the magazine-style Pickwick Papers were selling over 40,000 copies.

Everyone was reading it from the butcher's boy to leading art critics.

♪ Pickwick Papers made Dickens a household name.

With the growing income and the birth of the first of ten children, he and Catherine moved here, to 48 Doughty Street in Central London.

Now it houses the Dickens Museum, a time capsule preserved as his family home.

(Lucinda) Hello and welcome to The Dickens Museum.

(Gyles) Hello, Lucinda.

I am feeling I am coming into your family home.

It's too exciting.

-Isn't it?

-Lucinda Hawksley is the three times great granddaughter of Dickens himself, and today she's giving me a guided tour.

(Lucinda) I'm gonna start you off in the dining room.

(Gyles) Oh, it's--it's quite small, isn't it?

(Lucinda) It is quite small, but from where they'd come from, in Furnival's Inn, their last place, this would have been much bigger, 'cause they lived in a small apartment -when they moved here.

-It's cozy, though.

-Did they have a cook?

-They did have a cook.

She often spent a lot of time as well assisting the cook, and telling them what they should be doing, and coming up with ideas.

And they had lots of parties, so, although this is just laid for six, the chances are there would have been a lot more people.

(Gyles) So it's a wonderful family home.

(Lucinda) It is a family home, and they were very happy here.

(Gyles) Oh, I love it.

it's a really beautiful, cozy room.

-On we go!

-Okay.

(footsteps clacking) So this is the morning room, and this is what Charles and Catherine looked like -while they lived here.

-Oh my, of course they're young!

-They are.

-One forgets that Dickens, once upon a time, was a young man.

(Lucinda) Absolutely, he didn't have that ridiculous beard all his life.

You know, he was basing himself on his great hero Lord Byron.

-Hence the long hair.

-Yep, the romantic poet look was very, very fashionable at the time.

-He looks very charming.

-And she looks very pretty.

-Yeah.

-On we go.

(Lucinda) Okay.

So, this is the study, this is where the writing happened.

(Gyles) Following the serialization of Pickwick Papers, Dickens turned it into a novel in this room.

(Lucinda) And here we actually have a chapter from Pickwick Papers in his own handwriting.

This is an original manuscript, not a facsimile.

-How wonderful.

-So you can really see the kind of--the-- not very many corrections, but this is, you know, his real life manuscript.

(Gyles) How extraordinary, and this would go like this -to the printer?

-Yeah.

(Gyles) Oh gosh, so every manuscript is precious.

Nobody was copying it out for him?

-No, not at all.

-Took it to the printer, -they lost it--oh my goodness!

-Yeah.

(Gyles) I just think it's wonderful to think of him sitting there.

Maybe we should leave him in peace.

-We should.

-So that he can write -another masterpiece.

-Yeah, he might finish off -Edwin Drude, you never know.

-Yes.

Extraordinary, okay, thank you so much.

What a treat.

(dramatic music) ♪ It was while living in Doughty Street that Dickens also wrote Oliver Twist.

But he found the inspiration for this second novel a man and a half away.

Beneath all this scaffolding lies what was the Cleveland Street Workhouse.

Now, being transformed into fashionable apartments, this was once home to the poorest of the poor.

And Dickens knew of it because he once lived just nine doors away in one of the many homes his parents occupied while on the run from creditors.

♪ (David) Dickens was very much of the moment.

He is a social novelist, he is a political novelist.

He writes a lot, obviously, about the workhouse, and the poor, people who were excluded, and, uh disenfranchised, and often children, by the way, of which there was an awful lot of child labor, obviously, at the time.

(John) So the new Poor Law was really rather a cruel establishment, centrally directed way of prescribing what life would be like, what the diet would be like, what the meals would be like in a workhouse.

And the Poor Law commissioners and the boards of guardians of workhouses would meet in order to prescribe this almost less-than-subsistence diet for the inhabitants of workhouses.

And Dickens could see that there was a bit of a mismatch there and he was wanting to expose that hypocrisy.

(Gyles) In one of the most poignant scenes in the book, the half-starved Oliver dares to speak up, famously asking for more gruel.

The characters who punish him are fat, contrasting the haves with the have-nots, such as Mr. Bumble, the man in charge of the workhouse.

Oliver Twist was not only the first novel ever to have a child as the central character, it was also the first Dickens story to drive home the predicament of the poor, a predicament he knew all too well from his own childhood.

Next, one of the most shocking moments in any of Dickens's stories, when the brutal Bill Sykes murders his girlfriend, Nancy.

Was this, too, inspired by real events?

(quirky music) ♪ Charles Dickens applied his unique power of observation to the city in which he spent most of his life.

His vivid portrayals of 19th century London still allow readers to experience the sights, sounds, and smells of the old city.

The world that he creates is absolutely real, a hundred percent.

You are drawn into it, you're dragged into it, and he doesn't let you go.

(Gyles) In 1837, the same year Queen Victoria came to the throne, he published Oliver Twist.

Many of the landmarks he describes survive to this day.

There are, in fact, 93 different London locations in the book.

Its realistic settings, which Dickens describes so richly, were just one of the reasons for the book's huge success.

♪ A success that has endured in large part because of the famous 1968 film musical, featuring the extraordinary characters Dickens created in the original novel.

Adaptation of a Charles Dickens novel, which stands head and shoulders above all of them, right at the top there, has got to be the musical Oliver.

(Gyles) The film won six Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Direction, and Best Score.

Ron Moody also won a Golden Globe Award for his creepy and darkly comic portrayal of Fagin, who welcomes Oliver into his den of thieves.

♪ Although screenwriters have tried to stay faithful to Dickens's story, there's one scene they have tended to shy away from: The murder of Nancy by her brutal boyfriend Bill Sykes when he suspects she has betrayed him.

(dramatic music) Did Dickens, who based so many of his stories on real life events, use a true crime as the inspiration for this one?

♪ According to author Rebecca Gowers, yes.

I'm meeting her at Nancy's steps, that secluded part of London Bridge that plays such a crucial part in the novel.

Well, Rebecca, we are meeting, according to the plaque, at the spot where Nancy is murdered by Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist.

(Rebecca) That's what the plaque says, and the truth is this was where she signed her death warrant, in effect, but though is murdered here in the film, the musical film, uh, in the book, this is not actually the scene of her death.

(Gyles) So in the book, she dies back at home?

(Rebecca) Back at home in her squalid little room, where Bill Sykes bludgeons her to death.

(Gyles) So it's dramatic, horrific, and some people accuse Dickens of being melodramatic.

(Rebecca) I mean, it is melodramatic, but the curious thing is that he based this whole scene on a murder that had just happened.

There was this absolutely gruesome real life murder of a prostitute called Eliza Grimwood.

Dickens, although he didn't exactly copy in every way, the Eliza Grimwood killing, it is so close.

(Gyles) When Oliver Twist first appeared, was there great shock at this particular scene, the murder of Nancy?

(Rebecca) Yes, there were-- there were many reviews that, um, thought this was beyond the pale and absolutely horrendous, um, to put it in a polite book.

(Gyles) But he isn't being sensationalist, he's being realistic?

(Rebecca) He is because he's drawing on-- I mean, he's drawing on one of the worst cases of the time, but he's not making it up.

It's as though that case freed him to portray the very worst that might happen.

(Gyles) Yes.

For his next novel, Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens opted for a lighter tone and subject.

This and his follow up, The Old Curiosity Shop, were both huge successes.

Still under thirty, he was England's most celebrated writer.

But despite the fame and fortune, he fretted constantly about his financial security.

When his next novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, racked up disappointing sales, he knew he had to come up with a blockbuster, and fast.

Ironically, the story he came up with was all about money and how the pursuit of it can cause misery.

(solemn holiday music) It would be set against the background of Christmas, an annual celebration, which at that time was actually in decline.

The industrial revolution was at its height, and workers had little time for festivities.

But this story would change everything.

♪ Within a few short years, trees will appear in every living room, cards would be sent, and carols would be sung.

♪ The story was, of course, A Christmas Carol, written in just six weeks.

It's arguably Dickens's most timeless masterpiece, and more than 175 years on, it continues to resonate, getting to the heart and soul of what Christmas is truly about.

(whimsical music) ♪ The novel, with old miser Ebenezer Scrooge at its heart, was a runaway success.

Published on the 19th of December, the first edition sold out by Christmas Eve, and it's never been out of print since.

♪ In the years following publication, employers started to give their staff more time off at Christmas because they didn't want to be compared to old Ebenezer, and the phrase, "Merry Christmas," well, it had been known before, but it became universally popular as the greeting at Christmastime.

And "Bah humbug," that's what you say to somebody who's being overly sentimental at Christmastime.

And Scrooge, well, we all know one of those, don't we?

(peppy music) ♪ But what of Scrooge's London?

Does it, too, still exist?

Well, yes, but not as you might imagine.

Newman's Court is thought to be the inspiration for his office and counting house.

Whilst the George and Vulture, just around the corner, is widely held to be the place where he drank.

Leaden Hall market, where Scrooge sends a boy to buy a goose on Christmas morning, still stands, as does the Mansion House, where fifty cooks are supposed to have prepared a lavish Christmas dinner for the Lord Mayor and his friends.

As for Cratchit's house, the inspiration is thought to be Dickens's own boyhood home in Bayham Street, Camden, now demolished.

Unlike so many of his earlier stories, A Christmas Carol wasn't published in installments.

It was published as a single book, one volume, for Christmas 1843.

It was a special book for Dickens, and this is a special edition, which is why I've got to handle it in a special way.

And you see how beautiful it is.

Wonderful binding, gold embossed cover, and inside, wonderful illustrations in four colors.

And look at the title page in red and black.

Truly beautiful, and of course, truly expensive because of that.

But Dickens was very keen that it should be affordable and he capped the price for the book at five shillings, about twenty five pounds in today's money.

But because the book was expensive to make, even though it was a huge success, nobody made much money out of it at the time.

(cheerful holiday music) ♪ Still, when he looked at the overall sales, he knew that Christmas stories could be money spinners.

He wrote them for the next four years.

♪ And as well as boosting his bank balance, they allowed him to cement his reputation as one of the great campaigners for social justice in the Victorian age.

♪ In his Christmas stories, Dickens was determined, in his words, "to strike a sledgehammer blow for the poor, uneducated, and repressed."

It was a driving force that inspired some of his greatest work.

(contemplative music) ♪ There's little left of what we call Dickensian London today.

Even these streets, built when he was writing, are now gentrified.

Back then, they were riddled with disease and poverty.

♪ For the last 20 years, tour guide Richard Jones has made it his mission to seek out the London haunts that inspired Dickens.

And this is Lincoln's Inn Fields.

These are the fields that we're in actually now?

Lincoln's Inn Fields, this is the largest square in London.

-And why are we here?

-We're here because of that building over the road.

-Which is?

-Which is Lincoln's Inn.

Lincoln's Inn's one of the inns of court, and there are four inns of court in London, and this is where the barristers are based.

To be a barrister in England or Wales you must belong to one of the Inns of court in London.

So consequently, we're in legal London, and we're here for a very good reason.

Beyond there is the old hall where the Lord Chancellor's court used to meet out of term time, and that's where Dickens begins Bleak House, by comparing the Lord Chancellor's Court to a London fog.

(pensive piano music) (Gyles) Dickens actually set his fictional Bleak House in St. Albans, 20 miles north of London.

But he knew this real Bleak House in Broadstairs down on the Kent Coast very well.

For 1839 and for the next 12 years, he and his family came here for their summer holiday.

♪ But the fact that those holidays stopped in 1851 is significant.

Dickens had been married for 15 years.

He'd fathered so many children.

He was entering his 40s himself, and beginning to experience a midlife crisis.

(peppy music) Next, the scandalous affair that threatened to ruin his reputation, and how Dickens found a new way to connect with his adoring public.

(Gerald) Ah-ha, it's old Fezziwig!

Oh, bless his heart, it's Fezziwig alive again!

(elegant music) ♪ (Gyles) London in the mid-19th century.

The world's biggest city, and a hotbed of trade, transport, and innovation.

Chronicling the life of this fast-changing metropolis of three million people was a man whose own life was every bit as frenetic.

Charles Dickens.

♪ Always the workaholic, Dickens was busier than ever writing books, plays, articles, making speeches, attending functions, travelling abroad.

Yet, with his wife and 10 children, he also cultivated the image of a happy family man.

And his wife, Catherine, well, she was almost the domestic goddess of her day, even publishing a family cookbook called What Shall We Have For Dinner?

♪ The reality behind this supposed home life bliss was very different.

Dickens had become bored with Catherine.

A sure sign came when he arranged to meet up with an old flame whom he'd once been madly in love with.

♪ And in 1858, Dickens separated from Catherine after 22 years of marriage.

(somber music) (John) He put an advertisement in the Times.

He advertised the estrangement, as he saw it, between himself and Catherine, which in every opportunity he could take, he explained it as, of course, totally her fault.

And he implies that she's a bad mother.

He implies that she's mad.

She--he tries to get her locked up.

I mean, it's-- it's positively medieval.

It begins to be possible to understand how he could be in such a state of denial and suppression as to be able to effectively banish Catherine from his life.

That's what he did.

He wrote her out of his own story.

♪ (Gyles) The reason for Dickens's separation: The 45-year-old author was having an affair with an 18-year-old actress, Nelly Ternan.

Using pseudonyms, he paid for her to stay in houses all over London and France where he would visit her in secret.

♪ But with an estranged wife and 10 children still to support, he needed extra money.

(Gerald) The spirit led Scrooge to a certain warehouse door and asked him if he knew it.

"Know it?

Ha, why, I-- I--I was a apprenticed here!"

(Gyles) To make some additional cash, he began performing his works in public to huge and enthusiastic audiences.

(Gerald) Scrooge cried with great excitement, "Why, ah-ha, it's old Fezziwig!

Oh, bless his heart, it's Fezziwig, alive again!"

Yo-ho, my boys, Ebenezer... (Gyles) 160 years on, Gerald Charles Dickens, a direct descendent, carries on the family tradition.

(Gerald) Ah, but if there had been twice as many, four times as many, old Fezziwig would have been a match for them, and so would Mrs. Fezziwig.

And as for her, she was worthy to be called his partner in every sense of the term.

(Gyles) Oh, bravo!

Completely wonderful!

-Brilliant performance.

-Thank you.

Is that as Dickens did it?

(Gerald) Yes, he went to great lengths to edit his original books down to a--a sort of recognizable story for performance, so he created scripts, he didn't just read the books.

(Gyles) He'd always wanted to be a performer.

I mean, he--he was-- Um, he--if he could've been an actor, -he would've been an actor, yes?

-Yeah, yeah.

As a young man he took acting lessons and was on the verge of auditioning at the Covent Garden Theater for a professional, um, job, but didn't attend the audition due to ill health.

Um, and that theatricality stayed with him.

I mean, you can see it in his writing apart from anything else, it--it's absolutely there.

And how did these dramatized readings begin?

-Why did they begin?

-Initially, they came about as charitable readings.

He decided to give readings mainly of A Christmas Carol to raise money for charities that were close to his heart, and then realized that there was quite a lucrative, um, career open to him if he took them on the stage professionally.

And did he get a good response right from the start?

(Gerald) Yes, they became incredibly popular.

And he traveled around the country -playing to quite big theaters?

-Massive theaters, he traveled-- (Gyles) When you say "massive," a thousand people -in the audience?

-3,000, um, in New York.

-And could they hear him?

-Yeah, apparently.

So if there were 3,000 people listening to him in America, he was making a lot of money?

-Oh, yes, yes, he did.

-I mean, thousands and thousands -by today's standards.

-He had a tour manager who had a very large Gladstone bag and--and filled it with the cash.

Oh, they collected the takings on the night?

-Absolutely.

-Real pleasure.

(Gerald) Sitting in the hotel room after-- (Gyles) How wonderful!

(elegant music) Next, Dickens buys the house of his dreams.

If anything said to Dickens that he'd finally made it, it was buying this place.

And how his love affair became the basis for yet another great novel.

Here, Dickens is writing about obsessive love, exactly the kind of obsessive love he had for Nelly.

(peppy music) ♪ After Dickens's marriage hit the rocks, he, like many of the characters in his novels, looked for an escape from London.

He returned to Kent and settled here at Gads Hill Place just outside Rochester.

♪ If anything said to Dickens that he'd finally made it, it was buying this place.

When he was a boy, he would walk past here with his father, who would say to him: If he worked really hard, one day he could own it.

35 years later, he did.

♪ This room was Dickens's study.

It was here he created A Tale of Two Cities, a story set in Paris and London during the French Revolution.

And it was here, too, that he sat down and wrote the book that is my favorite, Great Expectations.

(uplifting music) Once more Dickens wrote about locations familiar to him.

This house in Rochester he knew as a child.

It's the basis for the crumbling mansion owned by Miss Havisham, an aging, jilted bride, who keeps her wedding reception room frozen in time.

♪ Great Expectations contains strong autobiographical elements, including a boy who lives his early life on the Kent marshes, then moves to London to make his fortune.

But was one of the novel's characters, Miss Havisham's adopted daughter Estella, inspired by someone Dickens knew in his later life?

"When I loved Estella with the love of a man, I loved her simply because I found her irresistible.

Once for all I knew to my sorrow often and often, if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be."

Here, Dickens is writing about obsessive love.

Exactly the kind of obsessive love he had for Nelly.

(contemplative music) ♪ In 1864, four years after Great Expectations first appeared, an actor friend of Charles Dickens presented him with this Swiss Chalet.

Originally kept in the garden of Dickens' home at Gads Hill, it's now in the center of Rochester.

It is where he completed his last full novel, Our Mutual Friend, a story that gives us Dickens's last look at Victorian London.

It was a city in which people still starved to death in the streets, and where the governing classes, in Dickens's view, were greedy, complacent, lazy, dishonest, and corrupt.

It's a story where Dickens mocks the rich and the wannabe rich, and it's full of doom and gloom.

♪ In 1869, during a reading tour, Dickens collapsed.

He'd had a stroke.

The tour was canceled, but workaholic Dickens was determined to keep writing.

♪ With Our Mutual Friend completed, Dickens disregarded his now failing health and he began yet another book, a murder mystery, a love story, The Mystery of Edwin Drude.

(pleasant music) ♪ As with Great Expectations, he set much of his new book in Rochester, which he disguised as Cloisterham, and where the cathedral was turned into the sinister setting for a mysterious murder.

♪ He was exactly halfway through the story, 6 of the 12 monthly serializations had been published, when they suddenly stopped.

Why?

Because Dickens had died here at Gads Hill in this very room.

According to his sister-in-law Georgina, who was also his housekeeper, he'd been working in is Swiss chalet, and came in complaining of feeling unwell.

She advised him to lie down.

He said, "Yes, on the ground," and then collapsed.

But there is another story: According to rumor, he, in fact, collapsed in London with his mistress Nelly, and she, fearing the scandal, whisked him here.

Either way, he suffered a stroke, and on the 9th of June, 1870, he died in this room with Nelly at his side.

(wondrous music) Five days later, Dickens was buried at Westminster Abbey.

Britain had lost its greatest writer at the age of 58.

♪ 150 years after his death, his phrases, his ideas, his characters are still part of contemporary culture.

We even use the term "Dickensian" to describe poor social conditions or a comically repulsive character.

And how to describe him?

It's simple really.

He is one of the most successful authors Britain has ever produced for a reason: He is the great storyteller.

(peppy music) ♪