Roy Hattersley

In CHARLES DICKENS'S ENGLAND, Derek Jacobi takes the viewer around the most important places, towns and cities that were the inspiration to some of the most famous settings in literature. The DVD features Cooling Church in Kent, used by the author in the opening chapter of Great Expectations; Miss Havisham's house in Rochester; the almost forgotten London Roman Baths used by David Copperfield; Joe Gargey's cottage in Chalk, the notorious Bowes Academy, the harshest of the Yorkshire schools and now known to the world as Dotheboys Hall. From Portsmouth to the Isle of Wight and then on to numerous London locations; from Chatham to Broadstairs; from Folkestone to Barnard Castle and then to St George's Hall in Liverpool. Well over 100 locations are featured. Many of these, such as 58 Lincoln's Inn Fields where Dickens first read in public, the All The Year Round offices in Covent Garden where he lived and worked and Gad's Hill in Kent, the last in a very long list of his homes, are not open to the public and their interiors have rarely been filmed.