Charles Dickens’s great, great, great Granddaughter visits The Heathland School

 For their last assembly at the Heathland school, year 13 had ‘great expectations’ of Lucinda Dickens Hawksley, the great,great,great granddaughter of Charles Dickens. Lucinda was here to celebrate the bicentenary of the great novelist who was born in Portsmouth 200 years ago. Through books like Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol, Dickens described the squalid "Dickensian" poverty in London and created wonderful characters like Scrooge and Fagin. However, Charles Dickens was also a free thinker and social reformer who challenged the establishment and wanted to improve the degrading conditions of his fellow citizens. In his day probably the most famous man in Britain and  was buried in Westminster Abbey in 1870.A truely Renaissance Man.