By Susan Cook (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH) In the fall of 2012, I taught a version of my department’s Major Author Studies course on Charles Dickens. As this was my second time teaching a course dedicated to Dickens (and my fourth time teaching Bleak House), I knew I had to pull out all the stops to convince my students—many of whom were non-majors or students who otherwise had no familiarity with Victorian literature—to care about three tomes of
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Local/Global Dickens: seminar at “The Global and the Local” June 2013
Charlotte Mathieson, University of Warwick As part of The Global and the Local, the NAVSA/BAVS/AVSA conference held in Venice from 3rd-6th June 2013, I took part in one of the seminars that provided the opportunity for participants to put forward a short position paper on a chosen topic. The seminar on “Dickens: Local and Global” was led by Eileen Gillooly (Columbia University) and featured the following papers: Sharmaine Browne, “The Railroad as Architect in Dombey and Son” Beth Drumm, “Consigned
Read moreThe Best of Times: Reading A Tale of Two Cities week by week
by Holly Furneaux The A Tale of Two Cities reading project and blog comes out of a partnership between Dickens Journals Online, and the Victorian Studies Centre at the University of Leicester. As part of the celebrations of Dickens’s bi-centenary we read the novel as it first appeared in weekly parts in Dickens’s journal All the Year Round, following the 1859 timing from April to November. We used the online edition of the journal newly available via Dickens Journals Online.
Read moreCelebrity Circulation II: Dickens’s Moving/Images
By Susan Cook (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH) Dickens was famously mobile throughout his life, walking miles each day, moving households repeatedly, and traveling often. “If I could not walk far and fast,” he once wrote, “I think I should just explode and perish.”[1] This quote describes an obsession with walking, a physical need to walk not only long distances but quickly at that. Dickens saw walking as essential, writes Rosemary Bodenheimer. Walking allowed The Inimitable “to bring his
Read moreCelebrating Dickens in 2012
Charlotte Mathieson (University of Warwick) Throughout 2012, the University of Warwick joined many institutions and organisations around the world in marking the bicentenary of Charles Dickens. Celebrating Dickens brought together researchers and students from the University to celebrate Dickens’s life and times, contributing audio and video podcasts, blogs, discussion points, a feature-length documentary and an interactive map, all of which was made available as a mobile App. The project was marked by the diverse range of content: literary scholars talked about
Read moreVictorian Literature and the History and Philosophy of Psychology
Serena Trowbridge, Birmingham City University In March I had the opportunity to participate in a symposium at the British Psychological Society’s History and Philosophy of Psychology (HPP) Conference at the University of Surrey. This session was convened by Gregory Tate (Surrey), and included four papers: ‘Definitions of sanity and insanity in sensation novels by Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’ by Helena Ifill (Sheffield), ‘Diagnosis and mental trauma in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette’ by Alexandra Lewis (Aberdeen), ‘The self-diagnosis of Sydney
Read more‘A Diversity of Dickens: Or, Should We Read Literature and Culture in Context?’
Mary L. Shannon, King’s College London Dickens’s London: Perception, Subjectivity and Urban Multiplicity (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Literature), by Julian Wolfreys, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012, illustrated, £70 (hardback), xx + 251 pages, ISBN 978-0-7486-4040-9 Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition: Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Lamb (Anthem Nineteenth-Century Series), by Valerie Purton, London: Anthem, 2012, £60 (hardback), xxvii + 190 pages, ISBN 978-0-85728-418-1 Dickens and the Artists, edited by Mark Bills; with contributions by Pat Hardy, Leonée Ormond, Nicholas
Read moreCelebrity Circulation I: Dickens in Photographs
By Susan Cook (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH) As a photographic image, Charles Dickens circulated far and wide. The man was photographed in excess of 120 times during his life [1], and was among all Victorians, as Joss Marsh recently put it, “the most photographically famous person in Britain outside the royal family” [2]. Ironically, however, Dickens disliked having his photographic image taken. Not only was he concerned that these images gave viewers a lie—a false sense of possessing
Read moreDickens in the West End: Great Expectations, adaptations and Dickensian fatigue
by Emma Curry, Birkbeck College Dickens writes in The Old Curiosity Shop of the strange feeling of flatness we experience a short time after an exciting event. He describes Kit Nubbles spending a pleasurable half-holiday off work with his family and friends, drinking tea, eating oysters, and attending a performance at the theatre; only to wake up the next day feeling full of ‘that vague kind of penitence which holidays awaken’.[1] As Dickens’s narrator laments: Oh these holidays! why will
Read moreA Conversational Review: Great Expectations 2012, dir. Mike Newell
by Emma Curry (Birckbeck, University of London) and Beatrice Bazell (Birckbeck, University of London) Emma Curry (EC): Arriving less than a year after the BBC’s highly-acclaimed Christmas TV adaptation of Great Expectations was always going to be a problem for Mike Newell’s new version of Dickens’s masterpiece, starring Ralph Fiennes as Magwitch and Jeremy Irvine as Pip. Adaptations don’t usually need to justify themselves, but in much of the press surrounding this film it seemed the writer, actors and director
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