Charles Dickens

Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812-1870) was an English writer and social critic.
He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era.
Dickens's literary success began with the 1836 serial publication of The Pickwick Papers. Within a few years he had become an international literary celebrity, famous for his humour, satire, and keen observations on character and society.
Like Shakespeare and Jane Austen, Dickens has inspired numerous professional and fan authors to write spin-offs or other works based on his creations. However, with the exception of Christmas Carol adaptations (which are enduringly popular), there are notably fewer fics based on Dickens's canon than there are stories based on Austen's work or even Shakespeare's. On Austen Authors, Victoria Kincaid identifies this lacunae and identifies some reasons Austen is potentially more popular with fanwriters:
==Notable Works==
* The Pickwick Papers
* Oliver Twist
* A Christmas Carol
* David Copperfield
* Bleak House
* Hard Times
* Little Dorrit
* A Tale of Two Cities
* Great Expectations
==Dickens-inspired Pro-fiction==
Some examples of professional authors writing Dickens fanfiction include Blackadder's Christmas Carol, (a fusion of Blackadder and a Christmas Carol that uses the plot of the latter to talk about the former; or Scrooged, a modern AU of a Christmas Carol. More examples: here); Fagin the Jew (Oliver from Fagin's POV); Evrémonde by Diane Mayer (a continuation of 'Tale of Two Cities'); and Dickensian (a massive crossover fic that brings together characters such as Jacob Marley, Little Nell and a young Miss Havisham).
Dickens died before finishing 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood', and many writers have attempted to complete the novel for him. One early example is 'John Jasper's Secret' by Henry Morford, which was first published in 1871 and wrongly attributed to Charles Dickens, Jr. and Wilkie Collins. The Doctor Who episode 'The Unquiet Dead' playfully suggests this book was inspired by the author's encounter with "ghostly" aliens.
One particularly noteworthy, if not especially famous, example of Dickens fanfiction is Robert Graves's 'The Real David Copperfield', a fix-it fic for the Dickens novel. (Graves is best known as the author of I, Claudius.) The Spectator notes:
==Dickens and Fandom==
===Historical Fandom===
 Dickens enjoyed huge popularity in his day, roughly equivalent to that of someone like JK Rowling (herself obviously influenced by Dickens). This degree of mass popularity is perhaps best demonstrated by the enthusiasm with which Americans met his 1842 trip to their country:
Dickens was also an important figure in the rise of celebrity culture. The Morgan Library's Dickens exhibition illustrates the mass popularity of his (somewhat contentious—his confidant John Forster felt they were beneath him) public readings, and the variable fan reactions.
Dickensfandom03.jpg
Dickensfandom04.jpg
"Cartomania" made him an instantly recognisable figure.
Dickensfandom02.jpg
Dickensfandom01.jpg
He felt a need to explain (in his own publication, All the Year Round (the successor to "Household Words"), where he also supported progressive female writers like Elizabeth Gaskell (Cranford, North and South)), the failure of his marriage to a public that was personally invested in him. Dickens feared the damage the separation would do to his reputation.
Dickens' novels were published in serialised form, and came out something like how an episodic television show is released today. This created a lag period (sometimes extremely extended) between fans reading the previous chapter and receiving the new one (some American fans waited at the docks for the next instalments). There were numerous adaptations (both authorised and unauthorised) of Dickens's works, during and after his lifetime, some of which were published before the official serial had been completed. "In those cases, playwrights would make up their own endings to the story, much to the chagrin of the actual novelist."The Familiar Dickens, Illustrated and Evaluated, LeHigh University
An example of the historical Dickens fandom can be found in the 1868 novel Little Women by Louisa May Allcott. In the novel, the main characters form a fanclub and start a fanzine for Dickens' 'The Pickwick Papers'. See, Fanfic in 'Little Women'.
In Of Sex and Faerie: Further Essays on Genre Fiction, John Lennard claims that "there is certainly at least one Dickens fanfic from the 1860s that survives in a manuscript fragment, W.G. Freeman's 'Pickwick in Jamaica', which takes Mr Pickwick and Sam Weller, from The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1837), to Spanish Town in the mid-late 1830s."
===Modern Dickens Fandom===
Dickens fandom is relatively sedate, particularly in comparison to that of Austen: the megafandom of the 18th and 19th century novel world. Fanfiction.Net groups all Dickens fanfiction together under the author's name.
Archive of our Own has individual tags for each book, all of which have relatively few works (most of which were produced either for Yuletide, as fanfiction of the television show 'Dickensian', or as part of a crossover with another fandom). Dickens's novels are sometimes nominated in Yuletide, but are rarely large fandoms within the Yuletide selection.
===Some Recs===
A fan called Scrabcake, who describes herself as "Tale of Two Cities equivalent of a Trekkie" recommends the following 'Tale of Two Cities' fanfiction:
===Some Dickens Fanwork Sites===
There have been some Livejournal communities: dickenslovers (est. 2005); pickwicksociety (est. 2005), dickenskink (est. 2016, a kink meme). Dickens was also discussed in more general communities, such as Vice & Virture (19thC fiction, est. 2003) and victorian-rpg (est. 2006).
* Charles Dickens on FF.Net
* AO3 tags for Dickensian, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, Oliver Twist, Bleak House, Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities
===Christmas Carol Fusions===
Perhaps Dickens's greatest influence on modern fandom is the Christmas Carol fusion (similar to Blackadder's Christmas Carol, mentioned above).
AO3, for example, lists almost 700 fics that match on the search 'Christmas Carol', and while not all of these follow the plot '[Character X] is bad in some way, meets 3ish entities around Christmas, and is then reformed', many of them do.
Some examples:
* Henry Jenkins fic Golden Idol was in the print zine Not What You Expect (1998), though this is Christmas Carol fic rather than an example of the popular fusion structure. "No Future" (2004), Lee Edelman's popular queer theory text, also posits a Scrooge/Marley reading (though Edelman somewhat mockingly disclaims the reading as the sort of 'finding ourselves' work that holds little interest for him):
"Others, those more invested than I in a reading practice that defines its goal as setting the record straight about authors and characters who are not, might dwell on Scrooge’s choice not to marry in favor of partnership with Jacob Marley (like himself, a bachelor businessman) whose name he declines to paint over even after his partner's death and to which he continues to answer just as if it were his own: “It was all the same to him” (46). They might point to the implicit anality in the text's depiction of that partnership and cite the lament of Marley's ghost that he never allowed his spirit, in life, to rove “beyond the narrow limits of our money-changing hole” (61); they might point to the ghost's remark to Scrooge— “I have sat invisible beside you many and many a day” (63)— or to Scrooge’s comment on the bond that once connected him to his fellow apprentice, Dick Wilkins: “He was very much attached to me, was Dick" (75). They might even point to the charwoman’s representation of Scrooge as a “wicked old screw” who deserved that his worldly goods be stolen from the very bed of his corpse because, as she puts it derisively, he wasn't “natural in his lifetime” (115). And in light of all this, such critics might claim that Scrooge has need of a rainbow flag, not a Christmas tree, with which to spruce up his home. In proposing that Scrooge be viewed, instead, as a canonical literary instantiation of sinthomosexuality, I make no pretense of revealing an “identity" encoded in the text. Rather, I want to attend to the potent effects of the cultural fantasy linking Scrooge to the fate of TinyTim as surely as the sinthome is linked to the historical consistency of the subject, or as queer sexualities are linked to the conceptual coherence of heterosexual desire."
* Kindred Spirits by Lanning (The Sentinel, Jim/Blair, 1999 or older)
* A Christmas Canto by SallyMN, (Blake's 7, gen, 2000)
* Humbug (A Christmas Tale) by Snegurochka (Harry Potter, Harry/Draco, 2011)
* The Haunting of Erik Lehnsherr: A Christmas Carol by TurtleTotem (X-Men, Charles/Erik, 2012)
* make my wish come true (One Direction, Liam/Louis, 2013)
* i wish i had a river by thepsychicclam (Teen Wolf, Sterek, 2013)
* Christmas Spirit by walkandtalk Star Trek, Kirk/Spock, 2014)
* A Spirky Christmas Carol by IvanW (Star Trek, Kirk/Spock, 2014)
* a modern day christmas carol by acidtowns (Attack on Titan, Levi/Eren Yeager, 2014)
==References==
*