Check out some links related to today’s 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens, beginning with the Guardian, the BBC, Dickens 2012, and on to two contrasting and interesting essays, the first by Dickens sceptic, George Orwell (“If you look for the working classes in fiction, and especially in English fiction, all you’ll find is a hole“), and the second, a final essay by the late Christopher Hitchens in the February issue of Vanity Fair, who “loved him in spite of himself.” For biographies, you are spoiled for choice, but a good place to start would be Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens: A Life (2011), and as for Dickens on film, we suffer from an embarrassment of riches. from David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948) to the slew of fabulous adaptations produced by the BBC, including Bleak House (2005), Martin Chuzzlewit (1994, my own favorite) and the upcoming Great Expectations.