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 moreTag: Public Engagement
Celebrating 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 moreThe Humanities, the Victorians, and Impact
Francis O’Gorman (University of Leeds) The question of the public value of the humanities has risen in the UK to new prominence with speed. And rather than providing an opportunity for scholars to talk about the values of the arts and humanities, the topic is now fraught with discontented, and discontenting, politics. It is plagued by emotive and poorly understood terms including ‘elitism’ and ‘democracy’. It is plagued, too, by the problem of scholars acceding too readily to politicians’ comprehension
Read moreOpen Air Learning: schools, education and the Whitworth Park Community, Archaeology and History Project
Ruth Colton, Melanie Giles, Hannah Cobb and Siân Jones Historic parks have always been sites of education for children: learning the names of plants and trees, games to play, how to behave well in the company of others. These were key motives for Victorian and Edwardian philanthropists, keen to improve the social, moral and physical wellbeing of urban communities. Arguably, many of these values are still important today, building on the educational principle that children learn best by doing, and
Read more‘Parklife’ past and present: The Whitworth Park Community Archaeology and History Project
by Siân Jones, Hannah Cobb, Ruth Colton and Melanie Giles (University of Manchester) Whitworth Park was opened in 1890 towards the tail end of the most prolific park building period the country has ever known. It cost £69,000, and was filled with features designed for the recreation and health of the surrounding neighbourhood. The park became extremely popular on its opening, “abundantly visited” by the local population,[1] with some “six to eight thousand” people present on a Sunday afternoon in
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