Charles Dickens, author of David Copperfield
THE harbour town of Broadstairs has been making the best of the mixed British summer. Children splash in the gentle surf while adults stroll along The Parade, browsing food stalls, enjoying the views and ozone-rich air. This seaside idyll might not be the kind of place youâd expect to inspire a book about pain, poverty and addiction.
But thatâs precisely what has happened: not once, but twice.
In 1849, while holidaying in Fort House â now known as Bleak House â Charles Dickens began writing David Copperfield, his eighth and most autobiographical novel, and a coruscating attack on Victorian society. Fast-forward 170 years, US novelist Barbara Kingsolver sat at a desk in the same room and was struck by Dickensâ spectral muse.
She began writing Demon Copperhead, now the literary sensation of the year, Âhaving picked up gong after gong: the Pulitzer Prize, the Womenâs Prize for Fiction and the oldest literary prize in the world, the James Tait Black Prize. And it in turn has thrown the spotlight back on the 19th-century storyteller, whose vast influence is still growing in the 21st century.
In 2018, Kingsolver saw an advert for Bleak House, a castellated pile overlooking the quaint harbour and Stone Bay.
Then a B&B working the Dickensâ connection (itâs private now), it was, she said, âvery much set up as if he were still living thereâ. That autumn, she sat in Dickensâ room and âfelt the presence of his outrageâ.
As if the whiskery writer was looking over her shoulder, she realised she wanted to âlet the child tell the story. I thought, âWell, I will. Thank you, Mr Dickensâ.â
The book was born and Copperfield became red-haired hero Demon CopperÂhead, an ill-fated boy in the Appalachian mountains, centre of the US opioid crisis. Back in America, Kingsolver made a spreadsheet and plotted her novel alongside Dickensâ original.
As well as deploying Copperfieldâs initials and five-syllable name, she transplanted each scene to the grim Appalachian present.
Dickensâ shoe-blacking factory became a Breaking Bad-style drugs lab; Mr Creakleâs Salem House morphed into Creakyâs tobacco farm; Mr Micawber became Mr McCobb and Uriah Heep creepy sportsman U-Haul.
âI had Charles right here at my elbow and we just had such a good time,â said Kingsolver.
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‘Dickens desk’ in Bleak House…
…where Barbra Kingsolver ‘felt his presence’
The 68-year-old has written 17 books â 10 bestsellers â and sold more than five million copies. Born and brought up in the Kentucky hills, where the country kids were scorned by the town children, she wore hand-me-downs and often went hungry. âMy whole adult life Iâve lived with this condescension, this unspoken judgement that people like me, from the part of the world Iâm from, with my accent and my background, donât belong,â she has said.
It was at the end of a UK book tour that she visited Bleak House for a weekend. She had been struggling to find a way into a story about Appalachia and the children orphaned by opioids, and she was allowed to sit in Dickensâ study where he wrote.
âThere was a lot of evidence of David Copperfield around and I began to wonder, what was it about that book? And he started telling me: orphans, poverty…â she recalled.
âThis kid with red hair called Copperhead appeared in my mind…I found my notebook and started writing.â Dickens fans will Â
spot parallels throughout. But thereâs another effect of Demon Copperhead: that Kingsolver has brought Dickensâ social Âconcerns back to centre-stage.
For all the picturesque Dickens TV adaptations â carriages, chirpy sweeps, top hats and Christmas cheer â Dickens was a chronicler of poverty and a social reformer whose work has had an impact to this day.
A Kingsolver effect has already been noticed by Ken Nickoll of Broadstairsâ Dickens House Museum, who is celebrating the museumâs 50th anniversary â it began in 1973 with a production of David CopperÂfield. Ex-journalist Nickoll has recently Âwritten a Dickens town trail, and will shortly publish a book about the writer in this  town where there are reminders of Âhim everywhere.
Among others, Dickens often stayed in The Royal Albion Hotel on the High Street, while the museum itself once belonged to Mary Pearson Strong, the model for Copperfieldâs Betsey Trotwood, constantly at war with the townâs donkey touts. With so many Dickens-related sites, one house on Fort Road, opposite the inevitable Old Curiosity Shop cafe, has put up a jokey plaque: âCharles Dickens Never Lived Here.â But as Nickoll says  of Dickensâ visits: âThey were the happiest years of his life.â
The museum is a picture of 19th-century gentlemanly comfort with an array of Dickensâ belongings: his writing box, mahogany sideboard and prints by his most famous illustrator, Phiz (HK Browne). Broadstairs was a place, says Nickoll, âwhere Dickensâ kids could explore and have the sort of Âchildhood that he had experienced, before it was taken away from himâ.
screen stars: Daniel Radcliffe and Bob Hoskins, as young David Copperfield and Mr Micawber, in 1999
Yet even here, Dickens was haunted by his upbringing.
âHe saw his father in debt and himself sent to Warrenâs blacking factory to work at the age of 12,â Nickoll continues. âThatâs similar to what happens to David Copperfield and, in Dickensâ case, it was a rat-infested factory on the banks of the Thames. There he experienced terrible hunger, mixed with desperate people, and saw things a 12-year-old boy shouldnât see.â Nickoll says the writer was âdevastatedâ by the experience. âAlthough his father paid off the debt and came out Âof prison, his mother wanted him to stay at the factory,â he adds. âAnd he never forgave her â or him.â
So even during stays at the resort, the writer had an eye for the less fortunate.âOn one trip Dickens walked on the beach and found an abandoned child,â says Nickoll. âMoved by her plight, he got in touch with a nearby workhouse and made all the arrangements for the child to be looked after.â
In London â where the writer spent most of his life â the Charles Dickens Museum in Bloomsbury is even more comfortable: two grand conjoined Georgian houses filled with Dickensâ memorabilia and room sets. Here he made his home in 1837 with wife Catherine when he was just 24, describing it as a âfrightfully first-class family mansionâ.
Yet in the midst of this splendour, explains museum director Cindy Sughrue â who is preparing to celebrate its centenary in 2025 â Dickens would leave his comfort zone to explore the less salubrious parts of town.
âHe was so obsessive about social issues that he was compelled to go out and talk to people,â says Sughrue. âIt became a core part of his writing method: to meet real Âpeople in the places that even the police wouldnât go.â Every day, often after dark, he restlessly walked the streets. âEven though he was wealthy at a young age, he came Â
from a modest background,â explains Sughrue. âHe was accessible. The people he met didnât see him as aloof and they told him their stories.â
Broadstairsâ Bleak House where Dickens wrote David Copperfield
Indeed, thereâs a case that Dickens pioneered modern investigative journalism.
âUntil that point, journalists relied on informants,â says Nickoll. âNot Dickens. For the first time, he went out and gathered material himself.â With this intense activity, no wonder Dickens needed respite.
âLondon was his âmagic lanternâ that gave him inspiration,â says Nickoll.
âBut he also needed to go away, clear his mind and lungs, and take the salt water in Kent.â This double life enabled him to be prolific, helped by a highly regimented approach that would probably now, says Sughrue, âbe called obsessive compulsive disorder. He needed his things placed on his desk in a very particular way and was very prescriptive about what the children didâ.
Sughrue believes Kingsolverâs novel will bring readers back to Dickens the reformer and social chronicler. Despite being transplanted to the US, she says, it remains true to Dickensâ concerns. âItâs a fascinating testament both to Dickensâ exceptional craft â in that the same structure and characters can be transposed to a very different place and time â and also to the timeless qualities of Dickensâ insights into human nature. That emotion is what makes him such a great writer. Heâs not imagining it: he experienced these things and fictionalised them.
âHe saw gangs of pickpockets within walking distance of his home, so characters like Oliver Twist and the Artful Dodger were true to life.â
As a social reformer, commentator and critic, Dickens realised his writing could draw attention to contemporary issues, providing a spotlight on real lives.
âEven Queen Victoria admired Oliver Twist â while her prime minister at the time, Lord Melbourne, said he âdidnât want to dwell on povertyâ,â says Sughrue. Indeed, Dickens directly affected government policy, supporting ragged schools and charities, some of which Âstill exist today, including Great Ormond Street Hospital.
While adaptations often gloss over Dickensâ grittier bits, he wasnât averse to sweetening the literary pill. âHe was also a socialite and celebrity who made popular stage appearances and wrote in affordable monthly editions about the working classes,â adds Sughrue. âPeople could relate to that.â But Dickensâ vital concern was to bring social realities to public attention in literary form, just as Kingsolver has done.
After taking apart and reassembling Copperfield, she hymned it as a âmasterclass…Learning all the tricks that he used to get the gentle Victorians, who didnât want to think about poverty and orphans, to look ÂÂÂat those kids and wait for the next chapterâ.
As Sughrue says of both David and Demon: âThe overarching message is that no Âone is beyond redemption. And we all can do something to make the world a bit lighter.â Or as Demon puts it: âCharles Dickens, seriously old guy, dead and a foreigner, but Christ Jesus did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a ratâs ass. Youâd think he was from round here.â
- Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (Faber, ÂŁ9.99) is out now. Visit expressbookshop.com or call 020 3176 3832. For the Broadstairsâ Dickens Museum and Dickens Trail, visit dickensmuseumbroadstairs.com and visitthanet.co.uk/attractions/dickens-town-trail