Dickensblog

'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.

Mortimer and Eugene: A study in friendship

By Rachel McMillan, guest blogger

Our Mutual Friend is nothing less than a universe unto itself. It twists and turns through mistaken identities, through the social whirl of London’s highest society to the royal Boffins of the dust heap, and through the mire of the Thames where Gaffer Hexam and his ilk sweep corpses for pillage from the river’s murky depths.

Our Mutual Friend is set in a London of smoke and fog: where the malevolent Bradley Headstone mazes through the streets to trail his arch rival, where the body of John Harmon remains a constant mystery, where Jenny Dolls barks at her father and where Bella Wilfer reconciles the toil of her previous life with her newfound riches.

Rarely has there been such a melodramatically winding path of wrongful identities, cross-purposes, unintentional evil and the redemption of love. Only Dickens, the complex author of Bleak House and Little Dorrit, could help us excavate the mysteries and riddles deeply embedded in London’s belle époque. And so much of this, fortunately for us readers, is handled by the good-natured pair of Eugene Wrayburn and Mortimer Lightwood. They are the middlemen and our guides through a confusing tunnel of mysteries and darkness. They offer good-natured banter, a healthy dose of slacker attitude, and a friendship so true and inspiring it makes us wish they’d invite us to dinner at a coffee house with them.

Name that character

The New Yorker reviews the Morgan exhibit, ending with this:

". . . The author wrote in an initialed note to Marcus Stone, the illustrator of 'Our Mutual Friend,' about a certain character’s appearance: 'A weird sharpness not without beauty, is the thing I want.'"

They don't say who the character is, but I remember, from seeing the exhibit. Can you guess who it is? First person to get it right wins two Dickens postcards from the Morgan gift shop.

Reminder

Charity is still looking for writers for the Dickens bicentennial edition of her online magazine. So far she's only got Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend, A Christmas Carol, and A Tale of Two Cities covered. If you're interested in writing about any other Dickens books, adaptations, or related topics, please contact her at femnista at charitysplace dot com.

7 Quick Takes Friday

• The Northampton Chronicle and Echo has a piece about Holdenby House, used for Satis House in the upcoming Great Expectations miniseries.
• A press release from the BBC about upcoming programs touches on Great Expectations, spoof series Bleak Old Shop of Stuff, and various Dickensian documentaries.
• At SummitDaily.com, Patrick Williams points out, "Diligent reading of Dickens is a far better guarantee of high verbal SAT and GRE scores than all the drilling for vocabulary tests or Kaplan prep books -- take note, all students."
• BBC News talked to the curators of new Dickens exhibits at the Museum of London and the British Library.
• The Kansas City Star interviewed Andrea Warren, author of Charles Dickens and the Street Children of London.
• This article about the bicentennial mentions that the new radio adaptation of Martin Chuzzlewit is a "reworking" set in Mumbai, India.
• Speaking of Martin Chuzzlewit, which I'm still reading . . . you guys didn't tell me it had a character named Pip in it! Imagine my delight when I got to the line "Pip's our mutual friend." What a quintessentially Dickensian sentence (even if Dickens himself had no inkling of it at the time)!

Tomalin's top five

Biographer Claire Tomalin names what she thinks are Dickens's five best books: Sketches by Boz, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend.

Dickens onstage

A few items of theatrical news from around the world:

• Reviews of Simon Callow's Dr. Marigold and Mr. Chops are here, here, and here. Interviews with Callow are here and here.
• Speaking of Callow, Whatsonstage.com has a special members-only offer for his upcoming Christmas Carol.
• Here's an article about the Young Shakespeare Players' 10-hour production of Our Mutual Friend in Madison, Wisconsin. Dickensblog reader David gives his review here.
• Charles Dickens Ghost Stories, a play based on several short stories, is currently running in Arvada, Colorado.
• The Haunted Bride, based on a Dickens short story, is coming to Hartlepool, England.
• The full five-hour version of Nicholas Nickleby recently played in Newcastle, England. Another production is currently running in Toronto, Canada.
• Here's an interview with the author of Scrooge 2070: The Reboot, a new musical that will open next month in Palatine, Illinois.
• The musical version of A Tale of Two Cities is currently running in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. A nonmusical version recently had a run in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, England; a review with very spoilery remarks and pictures is here.
• Auditions are underway for a production of Barnaby Rudge in Southsea, England.
• Finally, Stageplays.com is offering 10 percent off the script of The Haunting, a play based on Dickens's ghost stories, until Monday night.

7 Quick Takes Friday

• Simon Callow talks with This Is Local London and Get Bracknell about his new Dickensian stage show. (I hear from a friend of a friend who got to see it that the show is excellent!)
• Historian Cameron Nunn thinks he may have found the "real Artful Dodger": Samuel Holmes, who was convicted and sent to Australia at age 13. Details are here.
• The darnedest things come up in my Google News Alert sometimes. Here's a listing for a yard sale in Duluth, Georgia, where the people happen to be selling 1890s editions of the complete works of Dickens. Wonder what they'll get for them!
• Speaking of yard sales, here's an interesting Q&A about Charles Dickens, Jr.'s Dickens's Dictionary of London, a copy of which was recently found at another yard sale.
• Another descendant of Dickens -- great-great-grandson Ian -- shows up in this story. He's selling his farm and moving to his ancestor's hometown of Portsmouth, "to indulge his passion for sailing."
• In this interview, Sylvia Nasar explains why she started her new book about economics, Grand Pursuit, with Dickens. And speaking of books, Jonathan H. Grossman's forthcoming Charles Dickens's Networks will explore the impact of the 19th century's revolution in transportation on Dickens's work.
• Actor Ian McKellen is buying The Grapes, the pub where young Charles Dickens used to stand on the table and sing to customers. This is the same pub that later became "The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters" in Our Mutual Friend.