I thought I'd outgrown Dickens - but Dickensian made me think again

The sharp-witted BBC mashup of classic novels strips away all the flummery and leaves us with characters who are movingly real

My books are all in boxes at the moment. We moved six months ago, and discussions about where they should be housed are continuing. A key member of my household does not take the view that books furnish a room. Which is a long-winded way of saying, where the dickens are my Dickens? This article would probably be better if I hadn't had to spend an hour looking for my collection of old Dickens paperbacks, only to find the collection no longer exists.

At some point in the past couple of years I must have decided I could no longer be bothered to keep them. Not just because the texts are online - no one, after all, would want to grapple with Bleak House on a screen  - but because I had to come to find Dickens unreadable: all that word-spinning and subplotting, all those crazy coincidences. Energy in abundance, for sure, but taken to wild excess. 

I discovered that I had kept just two of his books: A Christmas Carol, which I used to read to my son every Christmas when he was small in the hope of turning him (and me) into a decent, caring person. And Great Expectations, because the book-quintessential late DIckens - has little of the flab of the middle years, and because the first five chapters are the greatest evocation of childhood in literature. 

The rest - books such as Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son and David Copperfield, which I devoured in my teens and early 20s - have been discarded. But good news for Penguin: I have decided to try again. And all because of the 20-part BBC1 series Dickensian, which started on Boxing Day, packed in four episodes in two days, resumes on New Year's Day, and will be popping up again in unexpected half-hour slots - the scheduling logic is impenetrable - some time soon (at least we devotees hope it will).

Dickensian is a mashup, to use the fashionable term, of bits of Dickens' novels and a score of his characters, all brilliantly reworked by EastEnders' eminence grise, Tony Jordan, and a team of co-writers. It is Dickens as soap, with the Three Cripples pub (from Oliver Twist) forming the traditional focal point of soap life, and Ebenezer Scrooge (from A Christmas Carol) and Mrs Gamp (from Martin Chuzzlewit) exchanging barbed pleasantries in the street outside.

The series has had a mixed press so far - the bizarre scheduling really doesn't help. The Guardian was unconvinced ("the problem with these particular characters is that the new thing is never going to be as good as the thing they came from"), and the Mail hostile ("looked like a game of charades for a gaggle of famous thesps let loose with the dressing-up box"). But the Telegraph ("a pacy, playful and subtle sudsy new spin on much-loved material") and Times were wowed, each awarding it five stars.

I'm with the five-star brigade. For me, the series succeeds because it strips away all the flummery. Fagin, without his band of lively urchins and cliched box of miser's trinkets, emerges as a clever, ingratiating, dangerous pimp; Bill Sikes, too, becomes more than a comedy villain; and Nancy - young, sharp, streetwise but horribly vulnerable - is a person rather than a plot device.

Better still, Jordan has developed the characters' histories: we will discover exactly why Miss Havisham became an embittered old spinster, and understand the full tragedy of the Barbary sisters, because the back stories of Great Expectations and Bleak House are being enacted before us. Jordan has done Dickens the great service of taking his plots seriously, and in doing so has encouraged us to do the same.

Dickens - I notice I have not yet written Charles, so metonymic has his second name become - played a large role in shaping Christmas, with his annual Christmas stories and the raucous Christmas chapter in The Pickwick Papers. He and Prince Albert might be seen as co-founders of the Victorian (and Germanic) Christmas, which, with some American additions, we still largely celebrate. The result is that Dickens survives as an influence - indeed, an institution - but do we still read him?

This Christmas I watched both David Lean's stark, expressionistic treatment of Oliver Twist, and Alastair Sim as the greatest of all screen Scrooges. Both are satisfying on their own terms, with wonderful performances and individual scenes of great power (the pursuit and death of Sikes, the Christmas-morning awakening of Scrooge), but they are also in some respects stock, one-dimensional Dickens that emphasize his weaknesses as much as his strengths. Is it pantomime or art?

Only Jordan has made me want to return to the books and immerse myself in DIckens' imaginative world again. And only Jorden has reminded me why, at the end of Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, the illiterate Mr Todd is so determined to keep Tony Last at his settlement in the Amazonian jungle forever, reading Dickens' novels aloud to him (apart, that is, from the unnamed two that have been consumed by insects) on what amounts to a continuous loop.

Waugh was dismissive of Dickens' emotionalism, and inflicting the latter's novels on the doomed Last as an eternal punishment might be seen as part of that critique. Mr Todd is a madman, yet perhaps in his unquenchable devotion to Dickens he is more perceptive than those who, adopting an austere adult sensibility, grow out of him. "It is delightful to start again," says Mr Todd. "Each time I think I find more to enjoy and admire." Truly, the occupation of a lifetime.