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Charles Dickens was born on 7th February 1812. Two hundred years after his birth he is seen as the most popular and most gifted British novelist.

But Dickens was a complex man as the excellent biography by Claire Tomalin points out.   Dickens used characters that sprang both from his imagination and his acute observation.   There are, as there often are in creative writers, echoes of his own life experiences re-written as fiction. In many ways his private life was more complicated than his fiction.

Perhaps the greatest quality that Dickens has, and what marks him out from lesser novelists, is his ability to see and to write about that which lies hidden.   His ability to see beneath the surface and to expose what lies beneath is what makes him not just a great writer but someone who made a real difference to the world in which he lived.   He wrote memorably about children, for instance, especially children who were mistreated or poor. He effectively gave children their childhood and encouraged his fellow Victorians to see them as children, and not as expendable mini-adults who could be put to work at an early age and whose lives and development counted for little.   Dickens was never afraid to tackle big or difficult subjects.

In common with many others I have just seen the excellent film, The Iron Lady, which featured excellent central performances by Meryl Streep and the multi-faceted Jim Broadbent.   Much of the attendant publicity has asked whether the film should have been made during her lifetime and especially whether it is appropriate to see the decline of Margaret Thatcher into the early stages of Alzheimers.

I would argue that it is absolutely right.   Alzheimers is too often hidden away, too little talked about, so poorly understood by those not directly affected.   Our family, in common with so many others, has now had a precious member of the family die of it.   It is a cruel disease that robs someone of themselves by small degrees. The help – or rather lack of help – available forces so many family members to cope on their own with a loved one who changes before their eyes.   The government’s avoidance and delay in treating the elderly (and it is primarily the elderly who suffer

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