A new series on Charles Dickens takes your favorite Victorian novelist to the streets.

This year, the United Kingdom has made books a special cause.

The National Year of Reading is a twelve month, government-sponsored campaign to get the citizenry hyped about reading for pleasure. And as our stateside feds scheme to restrict library access over that same span of time, it’s also one more reason to envy life across the pond.

We might debate whether reading anything is a virtue in itself. But the BBC is betting that shows about writers will further a noble agenda.

A new three part series about Charles Dickens, that grand daddy of British letters, will explore “the life and inspirations of [the] nineteenth-century novelist, journalist and social campaigner.”

The show has been pitched as a come-up story, with emphasis on Dickens’s flâneur tendencies. A “restless insomniac and obsessive night walker,” the Victorian gentleman apparently got a lot of his ideas from wandering London after hours.

Like his French contemporary Victor Hugo, Dickens trained his eye for injustice on encounters with the hard-up and disenfranchised. Who he supposedly creeped on from the street, during all those night walks.

Off this theory, viewers of the new show can expect a familiar biopic device: the good old cause and effect.

The show will trace how real events in Dickens’s life, “from his experiences in a boot blacking factory” to his reporting on the 1849 Tooting cholera outbreak, led to his most memorable creations.

We may hope for elegant analogs to Bill Sykes and Bob Cratchit. But this Havisham nurses some narrative doubts.

No matter. Sounds like, if you live in the Commonwealth, you’ll have plenty of screen prompts to revisit or discover favorite books during this calendar year.

According to the BBC, even more “literature-focused programming” is in the pipeline. New episodes of The Read, a BBC4 show featuring dramatic readings of famous novels, will revisit classics like The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, Little Women, and Oliver Twist.

There will also be some newly commissioned BBC Bookworm content for TikTok. Because we’re coming for you, kids.

If her majesty has her druthers, you’re all gonna finish those copies of Bleak House.