The good folk of Portsmouth, where Dickens spent a couple of years after his birth, may have just erected a statue in his honour, but the great man really belongs to Kent.

Rochester was the setting for several of his classics, he lived in Ordnance Terrace Chatham, during his formative years and in Great Expectations poor old Miss Havisham met her end in Rochester’s Restoration House, which Dickens called Satis House in the novel.

Then there’s Gad’s Place, Higham, where Dickens lived until his death in 1870. Dickens’ Kent connections abound.

So, if any movie deserves to do well in Kent, it’s The Invisible Woman.

Based on the book by Claire Tomalin, it charts the fragile relationship between one of the titans of English literature and his muse.

Oscar nominated actor Ralph Fiennes juggles responsibilities behind and in front of the camera, opening in 1885 Margate, where Nelly Robinson (Felicity Jones) is a school teacher with a doting husband (Tom Burke).

He is powerless to stop Nelly taking long walks on the beach, wrestling with the ghosts of her past.

Oddly, the opening beach scene was filmed on Camber Sands, in East Sussex, which does a poor impersonation of Margate. Kent audiences may be puzzled by the sight of a chocolate box village setting church in the background, which looks neither like Margate nor Camber Sands..

The film rewinds to 1850s Manchester, where Nelly is an aspiring actress in a family of performers headed by her domineering mother, Mrs Frances Ternan (Kristin Scott Thomas).

Dickens’s fascination with Nelly develops into something far deeper but she is forced to lurk in the shadows for fear of tainting his reputation. When Nelly talks about the impossibility of Dickens marrying her, Mrs Ternan is quick to snuff out that smouldering ember of romanticism.

The Invisible Woman is a well-crafted if emotionally stifled account of doomed love and its manifestation on the pages of Dickens’s works.

Fiennes and Jones deliver solid performances but their on-screen chemistry is almost as muted as the colour palette, while Scanlan is magnificent as the wife, who begs her husband to come to his senses.