1812 will be much in evidence this year in celebration of Charles Dickens's birth. The BFI is putting on a Dickens-on-screen retrospective. There have been BBC adaptations of Great Expectations and Edwin Drood. And later in the year Claire Tomalin's blockbuster biography will be out in paperback. In the dreary winter months of an ongoing recession, what better refuge than among Dickens's bone-familiar archetypes.

Everyone has been made to watch David Lean's Great Expectations at least once, but there are lesser known gems in the BFI line-up. The 1922 silent version of Oliver Twist; George Cukor's 1935 David Copperfield, with WC Fields as Mr Micawber; and Alastair Sim, in what look like the teeth worn by Alec Guinness four years later in The Ladykillers, played Scrooge in 1951. Every Dickens novel has been filmed at least twice.

Dickens's birthday is on 7 February. If he were around now, he'd be making a fortune, Malcolm Gladwell-style, running productivity seminars. The most striking detail of his biography is how much he got done while juggling a wife, mistress and 10 children. His success was stoked, partly, by his knowledge of what it was to be poor – with his father in debtors' prison, Dickens was pulled from school to work in a blacking factory, the memory of which informed his dislike of institutional hypocrisy. You wonder what he'd have done with the bankers and rioters.

Wopsle, Flintwinch, Pipchin, Jellyby… Saying the names of his characters is as soothing as the shipping forecast. No one is as pitiable as Miss Flite; as obsequious as Guppy; as sanctimonious as Pecksniff. It's good to have an excuse to revisit them.