Tuesday 7th February 2012: There have been global celebrations marking the 200th anniversary of Charles Dicken’s birth. Prince Charles laid a wreath on the author’s grave in Poet’s Corner, at a service at Westminister Abbey.
There was also a ceremony in Portsmouth, where Dickens was born. with readings by actor and biographer Simon Callow and actress Sheila Hancock.
A 24-hour readathon, organised by the British Council is taking place from Albania to Zimbabwe, reaching the UK at 9pm on the evening of Tuesday 7th with readings by author David Nicholls from Great Expectations, at the British Film Institute.
The Dickens Anniversary was also celebrated by the charity NewstrAid – a charity which was founded n 1854 to help men and women from the newspaper industry who were in need, and of which Charles Dickens was President from 1854 until his death in 1870
Google celebrated the day with one of its Google Doodles, and the artist Mike Dutton points out some details about the work on the Google Doodle site.
Dutton says: “We have quite a number of characters who showed up today to help celebrate Charles Dickens’ 200th birthday. Twelve recognizable ones at least. This naturally made for a pretty busy doodle, and while we managed to squeeze in a few extra pixels to make the logo slightly larger than usual, we thought it’d be kind of nice to show you a couple close-ups here. ”
“Of course, arriving at the final image was a slight technical challenge (as crowd scenes depicted at 500 pixels wide tend to be). So I worked a bit at making the overall shapes and gestures of each character recognizable even at small sizes.
For example, Scrooge’s back is drawn exaggeratedly hunched over. Tiny Tim looks even smaller compared to the ghostly apparitions in the sky behind him. Pip’s arm is tucked behind him, and he looks meek compared to Estella, who towers over him.”
