How we failed Dickens in his bicentenary year

Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, 20 miles of the sea. Not true, I was 12 before I saw a river and 20 before I saw a marsh, but if I confuse myself with Philip Pirrip, the blacksmith’s boy, that’s because I seem to have done little else this year but watch adaptations of Great Expectations, Dickens’s great novel about the deranged fastidiousness we call romantic love. Not that you’d guess that’s what it’s about from the prim and starchy versions I’ve been watching.