Abstract
In the BBC’s Dickensian (2015–2016) its creator Tony Jordan constructed a world in which characters from a number of Charles Dickens’s works interact with each other on a number of planes. The governing story arc is Inspector Bucket’s investigation of the murder of Jacob Marley. Although unequivocally Dickensian with his idiosyncratic deportment and familiar speech patterns, in Jordan’s interpretation, Bucket appears emphatically modern. The aim of this chapter is to compare the two Buckets: the original created by Charles Dickens in Bleak House and his retold version presented in the BBC’s Dickensian, to try to answer the question whether the modern Bucket is exclusively Jordan’s invention or if the contemporary traits exhibited by the Inspector are already present in the literary original.
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Notes
- 1.
In his Designing Virtual Worlds, Richard A. Bartle explains the concept of alignments as a means to categorise characters of the game: “The traditional alignment dimensions (from Advanced Dungeons and Dragons) are law/chaos and good/evil, with the crossing point of the two axes labelled ‘neutral.’ A lawful good character is benevolent and just; a lawful evil character plays by the rules but is without mercy; a chaotic good character is a rebel with a conscience; a chaotic evil character is a self-serving bully who’ll do anything to further their ambitions. There are another five combinations involving the concept of neutrality” (2004, 259).
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Jajszczok, J. (2017). Inspector Bucket: A Dickensian Detective. In: Krawczyk-Żywko, L. (eds) Victorian Detectives in Contemporary Culture. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69311-8_2
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