by Dan Bloom

Today marks 200 years since the birth of one of Medway's greatest sons - and what a programme of events there is.

Dickens enthusiasts are holding ceremonies across the Towns, the author's life is being celebrated in a play and Royal Mail is unveiling a series of stamps (left and below).

The Rochester and Chatham Dickens Fellowship will gather today in Eastgate House, Rochester High Street, for talks by chairman John Knott about the author's local links at 9am and 11am.

At 2.30pm all are welcome to a celebration in the churchyard of St Mary's Church, Dock Road, Chatham, where Dickens found inspiration.

Many of his characters took their names from gravestones in the historic churchyard, and Fellowship members will honour each one by laying flowers.

The historians will also lay flowers in memory of Dickens' sister Harriet Ellen, who died of smallpox aged three in Chatham.

Dickens World, Chatham Maritime, is hosting a gala bicentenary show for £5 a head in its Britannia Theatre tonight at 7pm.

The celebration will kick off with the band for the Royal Engineers, who are based in Brompton and were founded in the same year Dickens was born.

Music will include tunes which would have been played during Dickens' childhood. He moved to Ordnance Terrace, Chatham, when he was five, and later moved to the Brook which was almost an open sewer, filled with alcoholics and prostitutes.

The author's own darker side is being explored at Medway Little Theatre, Rochester High Street, which is putting on a six-night sell-out run of biographical play The Inimitable Dickens.

The play, which explores the 'Jekyll and Hyde' characteristics of Dickens' turbulent marriage, was written by theatre group member Gwen Whippy and had its opening night last night.

Finally, Royal Mail bosses have marked the occasion today by revealing two of what will be a run of 10 Dickens stamps for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee.

The two stamps feature illustrations from two of his early novels, The Pickwick Papers - which opens in the Bull Inn, Rochester High Street - and Nicholas Nickleby.

Are you doing anything to celebrate? Leave your comments below.