Francis Dickens in Fiction
The events surrounding Frog Lake and the battle of Fort Pitt are treated in The Temptations of Big Bear (1973) by Rudy Wiebe.
In recent decades, Francis Dickens has been depicted as a comic figure. In W.G. Grace’s Last Case (1984), by William Rushton, in a fantastic plot that includes fictional characters like Jekyll and Hyde and Dr. Watson, Francis Dickens encounters Apache Indians and (anachronistically) meets the famed cricketer of the title during the latter’s team’s 1872 North American tour.
Francis Dickens later was the subject of a comic novel by humorist Eric Nicol, Dickens of the Mounted (1989). The book is a series of fictional letters, a mock document purporting to be a record of Dickens’s correspondence spanning his twelve years in Canada, only “edited” by Nicol. It is still frequently mistaken for non-fiction.
Frank Dickens also appears in the science fiction novel that deals with the NWMP in an alternative history, The Apparition Trail (2004) by Lisa Smedman.
In the novels The Winnipeg Wolf and The Search for Spade belonging to the "Inspector Bucket NWMP" series by Jeremy Allen the leading character, Francis Bucket, is based on Francis Dickens.
He is played by Joe Prospero in the TV mini-series Hans Christian Andersen: My Life as a Fairytale. In 2007 a Fringe festival play called Dickens of the Mounted based on Nicol’s novel toured several Canadian cities.
Francis Dickens is a character in Matthew Pearl's 2009 novel, The Last Dickens. Dickens also appears in Bill Gallaher's The Frog Lake Massacre (2008).
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