The issue
Stage adaptations of Charles Dickens’s novels have enjoyed a renaissance in English theatre over the past few years, with ambitious adaptations of A Christmas Carol and Our Mutual Friend (under the title London Tide) leading the way.
As a world expert on Dickens’s fiction, Professor Bowen has been invited to deliver workshops with the casts of both productions, to help them understand how and why Dickens composed his masterpieces and calibrated his characters. He has also contributed articles to the programmes for both productions, which have shaped audience expectations and understanding.
The research
Professor Bowen is a leading Dickens scholar. He has published a monograph, an edited collection and more than fifty articles on Dickens and his nineteenth-century context, along with both scholarly and popular editions. His research shines a spotlight on Dickens's subtlety, strangeness and radical ideas, employing biographical, fictional and historical evidence to understand his work in new ways. He brings popular understandings of Dickens into dialogue with academic work.
The outcome
In 2022, Professor Bowen’s scholarship influenced the Royal Shakespeare Company's widely lauded production of A Christmas Carol. Its author-adapter, the playwright David Edgar, reported that the shape and content of the play were directly and closely influenced by Professor Bowen’s expertise and research, noting that his ‘arguments about the collective character of benevolence … did much to shape the second half of the play’.
Following his delivery of several workshops, members of the cast noted the ‘invaluable knowledge’ that ‘only someone of John’s breadth of scholarship can offer’. In 2024 he was invited to reprise his role as expert adviser, this time to London Tide, a National Theatre adaptation of Our Mutual Friend produced with original songs by PJ Harvey.
Director Ian Rickson praised Professor Bowen as a ‘brilliant touchstone’ for the cast, who helped the company to explore ‘how to centre our version’. For both productions, he was subsequently invited to author public-facing articles about Dickens which were featured in the programmes available to audiences.
