If this lass is abandoned on her wedding day, she’ll be sharing the cake around and apologising to all the guests for the awkward situation. She doesn’t have an obsessive fibre or a manipulative bone in her body.

It would be fascinating to meet this character before that fateful moment, but instead we get a young woman (Tuppence Middleton) who is extremely Dickensian – stoical, caring and yet slightly naïve, much like ‘Little Dorrit’ of Little Dorrit, Esther in Bleak House, Agnes in David Copperfield or Biddy in Great Expectations – but nothing like the older Miss Havisham. If this lass is abandoned on her wedding day, she’ll be sharing the cake around and apologising to all the guests for the awkward situation This is a lady who, in a single moment (one morning, at twenty to nine), is so psychologically injured that she dedicates both her own life and the lives of several young people to wreaking revenge on men, without a care for personal hygiene or whether bedraggled white lace remains on-trend. She is extremely clever and charismatic and, in line with almost all disabled characters who survive childhood in a Dickens’ novel, her poor mobility is a physical manifestation of spiritual evil. I believe in Miss Havisham in Great Expectations I have encountered one or two individuals who might well have gone in that direction had they only been hugely wealthy, powerful and not afraid of spiders. I think it’s a lot of fun, but the writing suffers from some of the same weaknesses as Dickens himself when it comes to writing about women. We meet a collection of Charles Dickens’ characters in a time before they enter the plots of their respective novels – an idea that had to be either terrible or quite fun. Seven years before the events of Scrooge’s reformation, Tiny Tim is already none too tiny, while the Artful Dodger is already perhaps ten years old and Mr and Mrs Bumble are yet to oversee the birth of his friend Oliver Twist. Along with the central murder mystery prompted by Jacob Marley’s violent death – a natural event in A Christmas Carol – a number of timelines are out of synch.

In the new BBC series Dickensian, creator and co-writer Tony Jordan is clearly prioritising character over canon. Contains inescapable spoilers for both Dickensian and a number of Charles Dickens’ novels.

Barbary dickens