Remember the Dickens bicentenary? For anyone wishing to take command of a year, to be born in February is a distinct disadvantage. The Charles Dickens Museum is closed for refurbishment. Even the excitable mayor of London has gone oddly quiet about the latest celebrations which, according to the Dickens 2012 website, are even now lighting up libraries across the capital.
"This," the website promises, "will be London's first ever pan-London community reading festival, with all 33 of the capital's library services hosting a programme of more than 300 events during April 2012, including book groups, children's events, local studies walks, author readings, film showings and more".
The enforced pre-electoral purdah that has kept Boris from sharing in the glory may appear providential to him, when he reflects on how many of those libraries are currently having their lights turned off.
It's not all doom and gloom: on April 26, Dalston's CLR James library is hosting Hip Hop Dickens – "a cool Dickens workshop exploring the differences between Dickens and modern rappers".
But Portsmouth, which chose to have its big Dickens read in the birthday month, seems to have had the biggest ball, with this audiotour of the birthplace museum racking up 100,000 downloads in the week of its publication.
Surely this was down to the dark arts of literature officer Dominic Kippin, a PR man with such chutzpah that he managed to turn a Dickens tribute by Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair into "Portsmouth writer on Portsmouth writer."
Even Kippin might have his work cut out wresting the great man from the devotees on the other side of the water, though, where enthusiasm shows no sign of flagging.
Novelist Jane Smiley alerted us to a new website set up by the Dickens Project, based at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Our Mutual Friend: The Scholarly Pages has everything from a survey of wooden legs in Dickens novels, to a gallery of adverts that appeared in the original serial of Our Mutual Friend between May 1864 and November 1865.
Silas Wegg was one of many Dickens characters to be lumbered with a wooden leg. Add to this the ads for crinolines, starches and worm tablets that accompanied him into publication and you get a sense both of how itchy and scratchy life must have been in the burgeoning consumer culture of mid-Victorian England, and of the remedies that rendered it tolerable. So let's raise a mug of Fry's Rock Cocoa to the 200 years that separate us, and look forward to the 250th.
