Happy 200th birthday Charles Dickens!
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by Dan Bloom
Today marks 200 years since the birth of one of Medway's
greatest sons - and what a programme of events there is.
Dickens enthusiasts are holding ceremonies across the Towns, the
author's life is being celebrated in a play and Royal Mail is
unveiling a series of stamps (left and below).
The Rochester and Chatham Dickens Fellowship will gather today
in Eastgate House, Rochester High Street, for talks by
chairman John Knott about the author's local links at 9am and
11am.
At 2.30pm all are welcome to a celebration in the churchyard of
St Mary's Church, Dock Road, Chatham, where Dickens
found inspiration.
Many of his characters took their names from gravestones in the
historic churchyard, and Fellowship members will honour each one by
laying flowers.
The historians will also lay flowers in memory of
Dickens' sister Harriet Ellen, who died of smallpox aged three
in Chatham.
Dickens World, Chatham Maritime, is hosting a gala bicentenary
show for £5 a head in its Britannia Theatre tonight at 7pm.
The celebration will kick off with the band for the Royal
Engineers, who are based in Brompton and were founded in the same
year Dickens was born.
Music will include tunes which would have been played
during Dickens' childhood. He moved to Ordnance Terrace, Chatham,
when he was five, and later moved to the Brook which was almost an
open sewer, filled with alcoholics and prostitutes.
The author's own darker side is being explored at Medway Little
Theatre, Rochester High Street, which is putting on a six-night
sell-out run of biographical play The Inimitable Dickens.
The play, which explores the 'Jekyll and Hyde' characteristics
of Dickens' turbulent marriage, was written by theatre
group member Gwen Whippy and had its opening night last
night.
Finally, Royal Mail bosses have marked the occasion today by
revealing two of what will be a run of 10 Dickens stamps for the
Queen's Diamond Jubilee.
The two stamps feature illustrations from two of his early
novels, The Pickwick Papers - which opens in the Bull Inn,
Rochester High Street - and Nicholas Nickleby.
Are you doing anything to celebrate? Leave your comments
below.
Monday, February 06 2012
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