Basic HTML Version
12
City & Village Tours :0845 812 5000 info@cityandvillagetours.com
Great Expectations
Did you see the BBC production of Dickens
Great Expectations over Christmas? The 5th
BBC adaptation (yes really!) courted controversy
for changing the ending but my goodness it
looked wonderful. The iconic opening scene
where Pip meets the convict Magwitch in the
churchyard was every bit as impressive as the
1946 David Lean film with John Mills and Alec
Guinness. And in case you are wondering David
Lean changed the ending too.
The recent BBC version was filmed out on the
Tollesbury Wick marshes near Maldon in Essex
but used exterior shots of the remote St. Thomas
a Beckett Church at Fairford on the Romney
Marsh in Kent. Although there are one or two
other claimants to be the original setting for the
famous opening scene it is believed that Dickens
was inspired by the lonely marshes of the Hoo
Peninsula in Kent close to his beloved home at
Higham near Rochester. In the churchyard of
St. James are Pip’s Graves - 13 tiny lozenge
shaped graves of children who died of marsh
fever or the ague which was the English name
for malaria. The church also has an unusual and
tiny vestry completely lined with cockle shells
from the nearby Thames and Medway rivers.
The Hoo Peninsula is a strange and beautiful
place. At times it feels other worldly and then
you swoop by an unmistakably Kentish vista of
oast house and orchard. We visit the church and
Pip’s Graves on the Hoo Peninsula on our
.
popular Together Tour called A Medway
Mosaic. It’s in the 2012 brochure on page 23.
This year in London the first major exhibition on
Dickens’ life and work for more than four
decades is being shown at the marvellous
Museum of London. That’s part of our Dickens
London tour on page 12 of the brochure.
Our modern world isn’t so very far away from
Dickens. One hundred and fifty years ago in
Little Dorritt Charles Dickens created the
shadowy figure of the fraudulent financier,
Mr Merdle, who made money for his investors
seemingly out of thin air. They loved him for it,
until his bank collapsed and many were ruined.
Of course that sort of thing wouldn’t be allowed
to happen nowadays. Would it?
Dickens
2012