Dickensblog

Maybe not such a great choice?

Thought Catalog has posted a list of "30 Quotes About Love, For People With Too Many Feelings." The good news is, they have a Dickens quote! The bad news is, they have this one . . .

Podcasting Dickens

The other day I did a podcast with Emily Whitten of Redeemed Reader and Rea Berg of Beautiful Feet Books. I was there representing Youth Reads, a Web page that I run as part of my day job. But I mention it here because, in the course of our conversation about what constitutes a virtuous love story, Dickens came up quite a lot! At various points, you can hear us talk about Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend, and Little Dorrit.

Dickens's inkwell up for auction

It's a beautiful one, said to be the inkwell Dickens used when he wrote Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend. Details and a photo are here.

7 Quick Takes Friday

• A conference called "Tales of One City: Charles Dickens and London" will be held October 6 at Chancellor's Hall, Senate House, in London. Go here for details.
• Penguin is putting out a series ("inspired by typography") called Penguin Drop Caps, featuring new editions of classic novels, and Great Expectations is included. Details and photos are available here.
• Simon Callow, currently performing his one-man show The Mystery of Charles Dickens in London, opines that Dickens would likely have been diagnosed as bipolar, were he alive today. As I've hinted before, I tend to think there may be something in that idea.
• Speaking of Callow's show, the Evening Standard reviews it here.
• Eugene Wrayburn makes Huffington Post's list of snarky literary characters to enjoy; blogger Dave Astor describes him as "nicer than he initially seems." 
• The collection of creatively titled fake books that Dickens designed and kept in his library has been recreated for the New York Public Library's new Dickens exhibition.
• Selina Scott of Malton, England, is trying to raise £30,000 to help the town buy an inscribed first edition of A Christmas Carol. (You may recall that Scrooge's counting house is said to have been based on a building in Malton.) Best wishes to her!

7 Quick Takes Friday

• A new exhibition, Charles Dickens: The Key to Character, opened at the New York Public Library today.
• A multimedia project drawing inspiration from Dickens, called Our Mutual Friends, will launch next week.
• This should be interesting: The Mad Dogs and Englishmen Theatre Company is presenting a stage adaptation of David Copperfield in Sussex -- with a cast of just two!
• Philadelphia has some bicentennial celebrations going on in the coming week: performances by Gerald Dickens, and a Victorian pub crawl. Also, in nearby Bucks County, Byers' Choice, longtime sponsor of Gerald Dickens's U.S. tours, is throwing a Dickens celebration this weekend. They've designed a new Charles Dickens caroler figure to honor the bicentennial.
• Meanwhile, elsewhere in Pennsylvania, they celebrated a little differently -- with gruel!
• To raise money for the Great Ormond Street Hospital (one of the charities for which Dickensblog has raised money), GOSH Dickens Day will be held in London on November 25.
• Finally, something I've been meaning to mention for a while: Herb Moskovitz of the Dickens Fellowship, whom I met at the August conference, publishes a free weekly e-newsletter called The Buzfuz, full of Dickensian items of interest. To subscribe, contact Herb at TheBuzfuz@aol.com.

7 Quick Takes Friday

• My review of Gary Colledge's excellent book God and Charles Dickens has been published at Englewood Review of Books.
• The statue of Dickens in Portsmouth will be delayed until next year because of funding problems.
• To help out with the fundraising, two of Dickens's great-great-grandsons, Gerald and Ian Dickens, are walking the 75 miles from London to Portsmouth. They're following the route taken by Nicholas Nickleby and Smike.
• At The Millions, six Victorian scholars give their picks for best Dickens novel. I will long treasure this description of Our Mutual Friend, by Daniel Pollack-Pelzner of Linfield College: "The opening sequence plays like a Scorsese tracking shot on steroids. A body fished out of the Thames becomes gossip at a nouveau riche banquet, from which two lawyers slip out to a dockside police station, where they meet a mysterious man who runs off to take lodgings with a clerk, whose daughter becomes the ward of a dustman, who hires a peg-legged balladeer to read him The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And I haven’t even mentioned the taxidermist." He also calls the novel a "Facebook fantasy."
• At BoingBoing.net, they're doing a series on Enthralling Books. Jay Kinney selected Nicholas Nickleby as the book that enthralled him.
• The Gravesend Reporter has some nice pictures and descriptions of Gad's Hill Place.
• Artist Spike Zephaniah Stephenson -- what a Dickensian name! -- has an exhibition called "The Inimitable Dickens" at the Portsmouth Central Library. Hope I'll get to see it while I'm over there!

Better late than never

Somehow I missed it when it first came out, back in February, but the 2009 BBC Radio 4 production of Our Mutual Friend is now available on Audible.com!

'Our Mutual Friend': The Scholarly Pages

This website from The Dickens Project, first launched in 1998, has been revamped and updated. Check it out!

7 Quick Takes Friday

• I called it, I called it! Just a week and a half after I suggested watching for Dickens references on CBS's Person of Interest, they obligingly gave us one. Harold Finch rattled off the title, author, publication dates, and a one-sentence summary of Our Mutual Friend after having been drugged, a feat I'm not at all sure I could accomplish myself. Well played, sir!
• BBC Daytime has commissioned an updated adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby, to air in the fall. Instead of a boarding school, Nicholas (or "Nick") will work in a home for the elderly.
• London is doing its first Cityread, and the book they've chosen is Oliver Twist. Read all about the event here!
• As it happens, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is also featuring Oliver Twist in their One Book/One Community event. Danny Heitman of the Advocate has a nice piece about that here.
• A group of teen artists in New York has put together a special exhibit inspired by the bicentennial, called "Sketching the City."
• How's this for a prize? To raise money for the restoration of his Swiss chalet, the Rochester and Chatham Dickens Fellowship is raffling off a strand of Dickens's hair!
• Speaking of raffles, don't forget to enter ours! We don't have anything quite that cool, but we do have a copy of the Great Expectations miniseries, and your money will go to help either sick kids or human trafficking victims -- your choice.

Dickens poll

The Atlantic has an online book club called 1book140, and they're planning to read a Dickens book in March. You can go here to vote for which one they should read! The choices: Bleak House, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Nicholas Nickleby, and Our Mutual Friend. As I write this, Bleak House has a sizable lead, with David Copperfield in second.