A statue of Charles Dickens will be unveiled in Portsmouth in the summer. It will be the first statue of the Victorian writer in the UK. The author was born in the city in 1812. The Dickens Fellowship has recently reached its £118,000 funding target.
The statue will be placed in the city's Guildhall Square. It shows Dickens reading in a chair and is being made by Oxford sculptor Martin Jennings. In February this year, the 200th anniversary of his birth was celebrated in Hampshire and in Kent where he grew up. Click on the video for our report.
A Christmas Carol is so appealing in the USA that every year, the author's great-great-grandson travels from Oxfordshire to retell the story all over the country. Gerald Dickens is following in the footsteps of his famous relative. Richard Jones joined him last Christmas in Pennsylvania.
A previously unknown letter from Charles Dickens is due to be sold at auction later.
The author, who was born in Portsmouth and lived until his death at Higham in Kent, wrote to his lawyer wanting to leave his wife after falling for a teenage actress. It could sell for up to £1,500.
Earlier this year, our reporter Richard Jones put together a series of reports on the Dickens bicentenary. You can watch his piece on the birthday celebration here.
He wrote fifteen novels and hundreds of short stories. And, although, he died in 1870, Charles Dicken's links to the South are still celebrated.
Born two hundred years ago, bicentenary celebrations are continuing and today people took to the streets dressed as characters from his classic novels.
