The British drama Dickensian airs Saturdays at 8 p.m. starting Saturday, March 13 on THIRTEEN and streams on-demand with the THIRTEEN member benefit THIRTEEN Passport.
In the first five minutes of Dickensian, a bingo card’s worth of Charles Dickens’ characters could be marked 10 times.
The British period drama – created by the BBC – is a creative adaptation of not one Charles Dickens work, but many (see characters and their origins on the BBC site). Scrooge (A Christmas Carol) meets Fagin (Oliver Twist) meets Miss Havisham (Great Expectations) as Dickens’ most famous characters mix in the same time and place – a densely packed neighborhood of Victorian London, where the mansion dwellers, shop owners, and have-nots rub shoulders on narrow streets while dodging horse-drawn carriages.

Daguerreotype portrait of Charles Dickens by Antoine Claudet, 1852.

The Old Curiosity Shop in Holborn, London, which inspired Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop.
The kaleidoscope of characters from separate Dickens novels gets some grounding in a through line when Mr. Marley is murdered and Inspector Bucket (Bleak House) – one of literature’s first detectives – begins his investigation.
Actors in the series who are fairly well known in the U.S. and for their other PBS drama appearances are Stephen Rea (Flesh and Blood), playing Inspector Bucket; Sophie Rundle (Peaky Blinders and The Bletchley Circle) as Honoria Barbary; and Anton Lesser as Fagin (Wolf Hall, Game of Thrones)
We won’t give away any spoilers for this 10-episode season, so tune-in Saturdays at 8 p.m. or stream Dickensian on-demand with the THIRTEEN member benefit, THIRTEEN Passport.

Illustration from Harper’s weekly of crowd buying tickets for a Dickens reading at Steinway Hall, 71 E. 14th Street, NYC in 1867. Courtesy Library of Congress.