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
Racism in the work of Charles Dickens musical's Jewish provenance, Jewish playwright Julia Pascal believes that performing the show today is still inappropriate, an example of a minority acting out on a stereotype to please a host society. Pascal says "U.S. Jews are not exposed to the constant low-level anti-Semitism that filters through British society". In contrast to Pascal, Yiddish expert David Schneider found the Dickens novel, wherein Fagin is simply "the Jew," a difficult read, but saw Fagin in the musical as "a complex character" who was not "the baddie." Jewish stage producer Menachem Golan also created a less well-known Hebrew musical of "Oliver Twist". Some