London Tide at the National Theatre is the latest in a flood of Dickensian adaptations. Few have captured the novelist’s surreal imagination – are solo shows the most successful?

Dickens and theatre are forever linked. The latest adaptation of his work is London Tide, based by Ben Power on Our Mutual Friend – with songs by himself and PJ Harvey – and opening at the National Theatre in April. Given that the novel depicts a London where money is the measure of all things and the Thames is pitifully polluted, it seems a timely venture .

But, keenly as I await it, I suspect it will raise all the old questions about the problems and pleasures of dramatising Dickens. What is extraordinary is the deluge of Dickens adaptations over the decades. In his own lifetime, pirated versions of the novels were rushed on to the stage even while they were still being serialised: one adapter, WT Moncrieff, even challenged Dickens to end Nicholas Nickleby “better than I have done”. I also have a cherished copy of a 1952 book, Dickens the Dramatist, which itemises all the stage versions of his books up to that point. The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist head the popularity list with more than 25 entries each: the former includes an Esperanto version played in Cambridge in 1907 and the latter, long before Lionel Bart’s Oliver!, yielded an 1891 operetta simply called Bumble.

Hotel that inspired Charles Dickens added to Heritage at Risk Register alongside Gunpowder Plot house

Charles Dickens described it as an enormous, labyrinthine tavern that was “known far and wide” and famous for its stone statue of an animal “distantly resembling an insane cart-horse”.

He was a regular guest at the Great White Horse Hotel in Ipswich, Suffolk , and was so captivated by the place that it helped inspire him to write his first novel, The Pickwick Papers.

Dickens was taken out of school aged 11 to work in a London blacking factory as his father sank into debt

It was an experience that ruptured his childhood but shaped his life’s work. Two hundred years ago, 11-year-old Charles Dickens was taken out of school to work in a rat-infested factory on the banks of the Thames to support his family as his father sank into debt.

Now the Charles Dickens Museum in London is marking the bicentenary of the bleak period of the author’s childhood by displaying letters from his father that illustrate the difficulties in the father-son relationship.