Emirates Litfest: Charles Dickens’ great-great-great granddaughter holds Miss Havisham’s wedding in Dubai

Emirates Litfest: Charles Dickens’ great-great-great granddaughter holds Miss Havisham’s wedding in Dubai

Lucinda Dickens-Hawksley celebrates the 210th birth anniversary of Charles Dickens at Emirates Litfest

Lucinda Dickens-Hawksley. — Photo by M. Sajjad

Published: Wed 9 Feb 2022, 3:38 AM

Monday was the 210th birth anniversary of Charles John Huffam Dickens (February 7, 1812 — June 9, 1870), who was inarguably the greatest novelist and social critic of the Victorian era (1837-1901) in Great Britain.

His great-great-great granddaughter Lucinda Dickens-Hawksley, an author of over 20 books, celebrated the day at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature, where she held an engrossing event called Miss Havisham’s Wedding —an ode to one of Dickens’ most popular novels, Great Expectations (1861).

There has been a long-standing view that Dickens is believed to have had an erratic relationship with his own mother and that reflected in the relationship between Pip, the protagonist of the novel, and Miss Havisham.

However, Dickens-Hawksley wanted to set the record straight.

“Dickens did have a very erratic relationship with his mother. His relationship with his parents was very good when he was very small. However, when he was 12 years old, his father John was taken to prison because of mounting debts. Prisons were a crazy place in Britain those days. You could be arrested for your debts and