Dickens and Mass Culture, by Juliet John, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, xii + 321 pp., £50.00 (hardback), ISBN: 987-0-19-925792-8 Dickens studies needs this book; the first to wrestle, in a detailed way, with Dickens’s strangely overlooked relationship with mass culture. Juliet John provides some complex answers to questions such as: What was the basis for Dickens’s extraordinary popularity? Why has it persisted from his age to ours? How have relationships with Dickens changed? What makes Dickens so translatable “across
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Charles Dickens at the Morgan Library
Jessica DeCoux City University of New York There are a few things you might want to keep in mind when visiting the Morgan Library and Museum’sM exhibit “Dickens at 200.” The first, and perhaps most important, is that the operative word in the institution’s name is “library.” While the Morgan owns an extensive collection of drawings, paintings and art objects, it is primarily an archive of written and printed materials: manuscripts, first editions, rare books and pamphlets, and printed music,
Read moreMartin Dubois, ‘Diverse Strains: Music and Religion in Dickens’s Edwin Drood’
In his essay forthcoming in JVC issue 16.3, Martin Dubois challenges recent interpretations of Dickens’s final and unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood, arguing that these have neglected the variability in Dickens’s representation of traditional religion. Dickens’s novel centres on the town of Cloisterham, where a spreading moral torpor extends to the heart of community life: the choral worship offered in its cathedral. Fuelled by opium-induced fantasies, the cathedral’s obsessive and unstable choirmaster appears to engineer the disappearance and
Read morePete Orford, ‘Scrooge in Space; updating A Christmas Carol for the twenty-first century and beyond’
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_KJG5w91cE[/youtube] A Christmas Carol is Dickens’ most appropriated tale, with an eclectic mix of artists involved in its retelling, from Mr Magoo to the Mr Men, and Batman to Barbie. The latest, and highly entertaining, offering was from the BBC’s flagship drama Doctor Who in its 2010 Christmas Special (aired in Britain on BBC1 on Christmas Day), in which the miserly Kazran Sardick (played by Michael Gambon) was the only man who could save the Doctor’s friends – and several
Read moreVictorian Print and Popular Culture Seminar Series at Liverpool John Moores University
Victorian Print and Popular Culture Seminar Series at Liverpool John Moores University February 9th 2011 – Dr Andrew King (Canterbury Christchurch University, Kent) “What Betsy Read: Sentiment and Sensation in the Kitchen 1840 – 1860”. March 16th 2011 – Professor Brian Maidment (University of Salford) ”A Jobbing Engraver in the Regency Print World – Robert Seymour 1825 – 1836”. April 20th 2011 – Dr Juliet John (University of Liverpool) “Dickens and Mass Culture”. May 18th 2011 – Margaret Beetham (MMU)
Read moreKathryn Hughes, ‘Dickens World and Dickens’s World’
Dickens World opened at Chatham Maritime Docks in May 2007 and it almost immediately met with widespread criticism. Dickens World, emphasize its owners, is an ‘attraction’ and not a theme park. Given that once-aloof museums are increasingly employing the interactive strategies of the theme park, it seems entirely reasonable that a commercial ‘attraction’ such as Dickens World might in turn wish to annex some of the curatorial rigour of the museum. For what strikes you as you walk through Dickens
Read morePhyllis Weliver, ‘Oscar Wilde, Music, and the “Opium-Tainted Cigarette”: Disinterested Dandies and Critical Play’
In her recent article in JVC 15.3, Phyllis Weliver reveals how the dandy’s languorous posture, aesthetic writing style, opium smoking, and musical repertoire interact in Oscar Wilde’s literature and criticism. Examining The Picture of Dorian Gray as well as ‘The Critic as Artist’ and The Importance of Being Earnest draws into focus how each of Wilde’s works is organized to create complicated relationships among this grouping, all of which belong to dandyish characters. The essay begins with a discussion of
Read more‘Nobody’s Fault’: Little Dorrit, Andrew Davies and the Art of Adaptation
Author: Valerie Purton Little Dorrit, adapted by Andrew Davies, directed by Dearbhla Walsh, Adam Smith and Diarmuid Lawrence, produced by Lisa Osborne, starring Tom Courtenay, Claire Foy and Matthew Macfadyen, broadcast in 14 half-hour episodes on BBC1 from October to December 2008. ‘In the Preface to Bleak House I remarked that I had never had so many readers. In the Preface to its next successor, Little Dorrit, I have still to repeat the same words’ wrote Dickens in 1857.1 Andrew
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