It’s that time of year for anything Charles Dickens, but this year, for the first time, his characters will meet in a new television show.

BBC1’s Dickensian, a twenty-episode series by Tony Jordan, will feature Ebenezer Scrooge from A Christmas Carol and the Artful Dodger from Oliver Twist and Inspector Bucket from Bleak House and Miss Havisham from Great Expectations, along with some elaborate setting elements from The Old Curiosity Shop and several other Dickens books thrown in for good measure.

“The set is a crazy place, but it feeds into the atmosphere for the actors,” Jordan told the Guardian. “Dickens used the weather and the light almost like a character in his stories and this was a way for us to create daylight, dusk and night whenever we wanted it.”

Jordan added that finding the right tone to honor Dickens’ vision factored into his process. “Someone said to me there are two kinds of Dickens, the soft focus one, the happy ending one, where it is snowing, and then the social injustice Dickens, with the gritty reality of Victorian England. He asked which one I was doing and I had to re-evaluate.”

Ultimately, he hopes to entice a wider population of viewers to engage with Dickens, as well as, he says, to invite risk back into the TV series industry.

“There is a whole generation of people who may know characters like Scrooge and Fagin but wouldn’t necessarily have a clue who Miss Havisham was,” he told the Telegraph. “It will bring a whole raft of new people to Dickens and his characters. You don’t need to have read the books or know who the characters are. You can discover them with Dickensian. That makes it incredibly exciting.”

Last year, BBC released Jordan’s documentary about Dickens’ Great Expectations; Dickensian will begin next year.

Photo Credit: BBC.