The extraordinary thing is that, as we approach the 200th anniversary of his birth, on February 7, 1812, Dickens seems to have lost none of his global appeal. Just look at what the world is planning for his bicentenary. More than a dozen literary festivals, from Sri Lanka to Ukraine to South America, will schedule Dickens talks and debates. And universities are hosting international conferences to consider various aspects of Dickens's world, writing and legacy, some of them very esoteric indeed.

The French, for instance, want to discuss "Dickens, European literature and the grotesque". The University of Vechta in Germany has three days of doubtless riveting seminars on "texts, contexts and intertextuality in Dickens".

The Aristotle University of Thessaloniki plans a conference on "crucial thresholds, moments of transition and life cycles as represented and questioned in Dickens". And in Berlin later this month the British Council is gathering a clutch of distinguished writers -- among them David

Nicholls, Philip Hensher and Dickens's most recent biographer, Claire Tomalin -- to answer the question, "What would Dickens write today?"

Indeed, the British Council has primed or promoted bicentenary events in more than 50 countries, from Burma to Vietnam, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe. It is sending the avant-garde theatre group Punchdrunk to Pakistan to create a new work based on Dickens's journalism, but set in the present-day subcontinent.

And a festival of 12 classic Dickens films, including David Lean's mesmerising 1940s adaptations of Oliver Twist and Great Expectations, will be rolled out across 20 countries including China, where writers will talk about the relevance of the great Victorian to 21st-century Asia.