Dickensblog

'TIME' magazine update

Radhika Jones, author of that excellent TIME article about the bicentennial, has started blogging about what she considers the ten greatest Dickens novels. She's already done 10 (Oliver Twist), 9 (Dombey and Son), 8 (Hard Times), and 7 (The Pickwick Papers). Start here and keep clicking to see all her posts so far.

7 Quick Takes Friday

• BBC News names six things that Charles Dickens gave the modern world. A couple of them are debatable, or at least could be worded a little more carefully -- e.g., Dickens may have enjoyed white Christmases, but I don't think he had any hand in inventing them. However, on the whole it's a very interesting and thought-provoking list.
• In the New York Times, Simon Callow reviews four books about Dickens. There's a nice little sidebar piece here about Callow and his history with Dickens.
• Here are new interviews with Miriam Margolyes and Robert Webb about the Dickensian shows they're starring in. Margolyes's new book, Dickens' Women, will be released February 1. And Webb's Bleak Old Shop of Stuff debuts Monday on BBC Two.
• An audio recording of Dickens descendant and fellow novelist Monica Dickens reading A Christmas Carol has been made available for sale, with part of the proceeds going to the charity she founded. Like the performances that Gerald Dickens does (and that Charles Dickens himself did), this is a dramatic reading, rather than a word-for-word reading of the book. The recording also includes an interview with Monica.
• Speaking of audio recordings, a new collection of Dickens BBC Radio Dramas is available, briefly reviewed here. The recordings are of Oliver Twist, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations. The CD set is pretty pricey, but the complete mp3 download is only $23.97.
• New reviews of the Christmas Carol-based Batman: Noel are here and here.
• Courtesy of a Brazilian site (I don't speak Portuguese, so please don't ask me to translate the text!), we have a promo picture of Matthew Rhys, Tamzin Merchant, and Freddie Fox in The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
  
  
  

Dickens and film

I've recently come across several articles combining the two:

• An organization called Film London is holding a competition for short film scripts inspired by Dickens, in honor of the bicentennial. For more information, go here and here.
• Speaking of the bicentennial, the Sydney Morning Herald has an interesting interview with Adrian Wootton, who "is in charge of the screen component of London celebrations planned for the bicentenary."
• And finally, Layla Sinclair at Screen Junkies recommends some Dickens films. Elsewhere on the site, Annette Smith praises the 1994 BBC adaptation of Hard Times and the 2005 Oliver Twist as two of the best films about the Industrial Revolution.

The perfect setting

The Library Theatre in Manchester, England, came up with an inspired idea: putting on a production of Hard Times in a mill very much like the ones in the story. In fact, Jonathan Scofield writes, Dickens probably saw this very mill during one of his visits to Manchester. More articles and reviews are here, here, here, and here.

That's a first

Here's someone who actually wishes a Dickens book were longer. I can't say I've ever seen that before.

7 Quick Takes Friday

• It's been determined that the fire at one of Dickens's favorite pubs was caused by arson.
• Lucinda Hawksley (great-great-great-granddaughter of Dickens) has been giving talks about her famous ancestor in India, where she was taken by surprise at the amount of interest in him.
• A new exhibition at the Coningsby Gallery in London, "London's Underworld Unearthed: The Secret Life of the Rookery," features excerpts from the writings of Dickens.
• In addition to his cat's-paw letter opener, the New York Public Library also has the marked-up copy of David Copperfield that Dickens used for public readings.
• Macalester College President Brian Rosenberg writes about the importance of Dickens's ideas in education and business.
• Jacobs School of Music student Ari Fisher has been chosen to write a new score for the 1922 silent film adaptation of David Copperfield. The score will premiere at a screening of the film on Dickens's 200th birthday.
• Last but not least . . . actor Edward Hardwicke died today at the age of 78. He was perhaps best known for playing Dr. Watson to Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes, but Dickensians will also know him as Mr. Wickfield (2000) and Mr. Brownlow (2005). R.I.P.

Dude, did you even READ the books?

The New York Post recently ran this jawdropper of a passage, quoting George Orwell:

"In George Orwell’s essay on Charles Dickens, he wonders what the Victorian novelist’s heroes get up to after the books end: 'The answer evidently is that they did nothing . . . That is the spirit in which most of Dickens’ books end — a sort of radiant idleness. His heroes, once they had come into money and "settled down," would not only do no work; they would not even ride, hunt, shoot, fight duels, elope with actresses or lose money at the races. They would simply live at home in feather-bed respectability, and preferably next door to a blood-relation living exactly the same life.'"

(Full quote available here.)

I hope it doesn't look like I'm trying to detract from Orwell's undisputed greatness, if I ask what on earth he was smoking when he wrote that. I can think of maybe THREE Dickens novels that ended this way. And if you take a novel like Hard Times or Great Expectations or Little Dorrit, or any one of a number of others I could name, that's almost the exact opposite of the way that they ended.

Yes, Orwell was undoubtedly a great writer . . . but as a Dickens critic, he may have left a little something to be desired.

Poll results

Thanks to everyone who took the poll about what you'd like to see more of in the new year. While you'll still be seeing all the same kinds of posts, it helps me know how to balance them better and keep things interesting!

As you can see, "analysis and discussion" won in a landslide, with movie reviews in second place. I'd like to invite you all again to comment here and let me know some of your ideas for these, if you have any. My next review will probably be of the first Little Dorrit miniseries (if I can ever get it finished! That thing is LONG!). After that, Barnaby Rudge and then Hard Times, which I've been wanting to see. But I'm open for suggestions for what should come after that!

With friends like these . . .

Dickens-quoting terrorists? Oh, great.

7 Quick Takes Friday

• It's been confirmed that the city of Portsmouth will receive a Heritage Lottery Grant of £265,800 to celebrate Dickens's bicentennial.
• A first edition of A Christmas Carol inscribed to William Macready could fetch as much as £200,000 at auction. Articles are here and here.
• High schoolers in Dover, Delaware, are invited to participate in a speech contest based on Scrooge!, an adpatation of A Christmas Carol. Click here for more information.
• A puppet troupe in Toronto is doing a production of Hard Times. Reviews are here and here. (Special thanks to Peter Chattaway.)
• Here's a little more information about the upcoming Doctor Who special based on A Christmas Carol.
• One professor argues that a single conversation that Edgar Allan Poe had with Dickens "changed American poetry forever." It would be nice to think so, but it sounds as if the professor has a tendency to exaggerate, so I'm not so sure.
• In case you missed them in the comment section, Sara with the Lyric Stage of Boston dropped by to tell us that the company's production of Nicholas Nickleby has been cut from nine to six hours, and Carla Sarett shared a link to her short story about a woman trying to update and adapt David Copperfield for the big screen. Thank you both!