Britain marks Charles Dickens bicentenary

Prince Charles and Ralph Fiennes, who is starring in the latest film version of Dickens\' masterpiece "Great Expectations", attended the ceremony in Poets\' Corner at the abbey, where Dickens was buried in 1870.

The congregation included what is believed to be the largest ever gathering of descendants of the Victorian novelist as well as representatives from the worlds of literature, film and theatre.

The author had asked to be buried at Rochester Cathedral in his beloved Kent in southeast England, but a public outcry led to him being placed in Poets\' Corner.

Fiennes, who will star as Magwitch in the adaptation of "Great Expectations", was to read an extract from another of Dickens\' greatest novels, "Bleak House".

Another reading was to be given by Mark Dickens, the writer\'s great-great-grandson.

In Portsmouth, the port city on England\'s south coast where Dickens\' father worked for the navy, actor Simon Callow said the celebrations would be a "dangerously moving occasion".

"I really made the strong decision to come to the place where he was born rather than to Westminster," he said, "where he never wanted to be".

Callow, who has written a biography of Dickens, will make a reading at a church service in Portsmouth from "David Copperfield", first published as a novel in 1850.

The tale was inspired by Dickens\' experiences as a boy working in a leather blacking factory when the family fell on hard times after his father was sent to the debtors\' prison.

By his mid-20s, Dickens was a literary star and his fame continued to grow.

Claire Tomalin, one of his leading biographers, said Dickens was an incomparable talent.

"After Shakespeare he was the greatest inventor of character. His characters remain -- even people who haven\'t read his work know Mister Micawber, Oliver and Fagin," she told AFP.

"I think he wrote his characters through their voices, and that is why they dramatise so well.

"He wanted to show that ordinary people were as interesting as rich, famous, grand people. He succeeded in that, and he was funny too, he made people laugh."

Aside from Dickens\' prodigious output of articles and novels, he also helped to run and to finance a house for "fallen women", offering prostitutes a fresh start away from their old lives in a large house in London.

The ultimate goal was to send them to Australia to find jobs and start their own families.

Dickens also found time to father 10 children and as his fame spread, he embarked on lecture tours of the United States.

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