Dickens's Afterlife: Character and Cultural Memory

As a post-mortem of Dickens, this paper will examine Dickensian afterlives in modern multimedia representations of Dickens and his characters. I will consider these representations and modern popular culture's representational balance between the writer and his works. The three recent examples of Dickens and his characters in different media – small screen, video game, and cinema – that will be discussed are: the 2015 BBC series Dickensian; the ‘Darwin and Dickens Conspiracy’ additional downloadable content (DLC) of the 2015 video game Assassin's Creed: Syndicate; and the 2017 film The Man Who Invented Christmas. These modern appropriations of Dickens illustrate how Dickens's characters persist in cultural memory, and indeed how Dickens himself has become a recognisable character. I will examine how these adaptations are rooted not in familiarity with the original texts, but in a shared cultural memory of Dickens and his characters. Ultimately, these Dickensian afterlives show that Dickens and his characters can be used in popular culture as a pseudo-authentication of the Victorian and as a memorial of Dickens himself.