Penguin Books poll to mark 200th anniversary of author's birth reveals miser from A Christmas Carol as best loved
A cold-hearted miser bullied by ghosts into gaining a conscience has triumphed over a festering, jilted bride and an alcoholic, nihilistic barrister – not to mention the odd pickpocket and escaped convict – to be named the most popular Charles Dickens character.
Ebenezer Scrooge saw off many of the writer's best known and loved creations, including Miss Havisham, Sydney Carton, the Artful Dodger, Fagin, Nancy and Magwitch, in a Penguin Books poll commissioned to mark the 200th anniversary this week of Dickens's birth.
The top 10 is light on unadulterated goodness, with only Pip and Joe Gargery from Great Expectations and Betsey Trotwood from David Copperfield representing the kinder faces among the Dickensian ranks.
And although the list is heavily slanted towards Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, Oliver himself was left wanting more votes at No 11.
Claire Tomalin, whose highly acclaimed biography of Dickens was published last year, said that Scrooge's popularity was surprising given that his 21st-century equivalent might be a banker.
"But Dickens excelled in creating villains, and always gave them more energy and brio than his good characters, so that we never forget them," she said. "Scrooge is a monster, a wicked employer and a heartless miser, but he is allowed to repent and see the error of his ways."
Some of Britain's bestselling authors also picked their favourite Dickens characters. Tim Lott and Josephine Cox opted for Pip and Oliver respectively; Freya North chose Uriah Heep, describing him as a "loathsome character who seeps from the pages like a noxious gas"; Daisy Goodwin went for "the anti-heroine of Bleak House", Lady Dedlock, while Adele Parks favoured the "morally ambiguous" Nancy from Oliver Twist.
Tomalin has also used the anniversary to lament young readers' inability to get to grips with Dickens.
"Today's children have very short attention spans because they are being reared on dreadful television programmes which are flickering away in the corner," she said.
"Children are not being educated to have prolonged attention spans and you have to be prepared to read steadily for a Dickens novel and I think that's a pity."
Tomalin described Dickens as "the greatest creator of characters in English" after Shakespeare and stressed his enduring relevance to Britain in 2012.
"When he went to America in 1842, one of the points he made was that the 'unimportant' and 'peripheral' people were just as interesting to write about as 'great' people," she said.
"You only have to look around our society and everything he wrote about in the 1840s is still relevant – the great gulf between the rich and poor, corrupt financiers, corrupt members of parliament, how the country is run by old Etonians, you name it, he said it."
Events are taking place across the globe to mark Dickens's 200th birthday on Tuesday 7 February, including a street party in the road where he was born in Portsmouth, and a wreath-laying ceremony at his grave in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, London. The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall will attend the abbey ceremony, where readers will include Tomalin and the actor and director Ralph Fiennes. The British Council has also organised a global Dickens read-a-thon, which will see a reading marathon lasting 24 hours in 24 different countries from Albania to Zimbabwe.