Charles Dickens Dickens enjoyed reading as a youth. Dickens was the most popular novelist of his time, and remains one of the best-known and most-read of English authors. His works have never gone out of print, and have been adapted continually for the screen since the invention of cinema, with at least 200 motion pictures and TV adaptations based on Dickens's works documented. Many of his works were adapted for the stage during his own lifetime, and as early as 1913, a silent film of "The Pickwick Papers" was made. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded
Francis Dickens Rudy Wiebe. In recent decades, Francis Dickens has been depicted as a comic figure. In "W.G. Grace's Last Case" (1984), by William Rushton, in a fantastic plot that includes fictional characters like Jekyll and Hyde and Dr. Watson, Francis Dickens encounters Apache Indians and (anachronistically) meets the famed cricketer of the title during the latter's team's 1872 North American tour. Francis Dickens later was the subject of a comic novel by humorist Eric Nicol, "Dickens of the Mounted" (1989). The book is a series of fictional letters, a mock document purporting to be a record of Dickens's correspondence spanning his