Dickensblog

The power of 'The Chimes'

In Crisis magazine, Edward Mordrake argues convincingly that "There is perhaps no better tale to ring an old year out and a new year in than Charles Dickens’ goblin story, The Chimes," and that "This book rings out a tremendous moral for all who live surrounded by suffering." Read more here.

A New Year carol

Happy New Year! Here's an interesting piece from Anglophenia, about how The Chimes did for New Year's Day what A Christmas Carol did for Christmas.

Borrowed from Dickens

Joseph Bottum, author of what's probably my all-time favorite essay about Dickens, has written a delightful little Christmas tale in which he uses the names of many characters from Dickens's Christmas stories, such as Toby Veck (The Chimes), May Fielding (The Cricket on the Hearth), and Clemency Newcome (The Battle of Life). Bottum's Wise Guy is available on Amazon as a 99-cent e-book.

7 Quick Takes Friday

• Twist the musical is coming to the Pasadena Playhouse in California. Information is here and here.
• The unabridged audiobook of David Copperfield read by Simon Vance made Audible.com's list of top sellers in November. It's currently available for free when you subscribe to one of their plans, along with two weeks of free service. They also have a dramatization of The Chimes, which made their bestseller list for the first week of January.
• Troops and their families got to see a performance of A Christmas Carol at Chicago's Goodman Theatre for free in December, when the theater donated 500 tickets.
• Historians fighting to save a workhouse in London have produced evidence that it was the basis for the depiction of the workhouse in Oliver Twist. (One wonders if Dickens would have been quite so eager to save it.)
• The Riverside Dickens Festival in Riverside, California, begins January 21 with "Mr. Pickwick's Pub Night Dinner Theater." The Festival's featured book this year is Barnaby Rudge. Info is here and here.
• The Pickwick Papers has been translated into Turkish for the first time.
• Second-graders at Westminster Academy in Memphis, Tennessee, got to enjoy a "Dickens Breakfast" before seeing a performance of A Christmas Carol.

7 Quick Takes Friday

• Dickens and his works will play an important role in the first-ever Literature Festival in Malton, England, this weekend. Go here for more information.
• He also has a role in this weekend's Bloomsbury Festival in London . . .
• . . . And in Wicked Literature: A Halloween Theatre Festival in Altadena, California, this month . . .
• . . . And in Naper Settlement's History Speaks Lecture Series this December in Illinois. Busy man, our Mr. Dickens.
• A new Christmas opera called "God Bless Us Everyone," set to music by Thomas Pasatieri, premieres at the Dicapo Opera Theatre in New York in December. According to the description at Dicapo's site, "Scrooge has just died and everyone is two decades older. Tiny Tim has moved from England to the New World, and as so many immigrants, has served as a British mercenary in the Union Army during the American Civil War. . . . Be prepared for some surprises." I should say so!
• Tickets are on sale for the 31st annual Great Dickens Christmas Fair in San Francisco. Information is available here and here.
• And today Hereafter opens nationwide, so this evening I'm off for a nice game of Spot the Dickens References. Hopefully I'll do a little better than Matt Damon, who doesn't remember which audiobook his character listened to in the film. (He did "really like the Charles Dickens stuff," though, so we'll give him a point for that -- unlike his interviewer, who thought Mr. Micawber was in The Pickwick Papers.) I'll report back today or tomorrow. If you see it and want to share your thoughts, feel free to use the comment section!

7 Quick Takes Friday

• Want to meet Mr. Dickens in person? You might try the sixth annual Victorian Ghost Walk this Halloween weekend -- although why he'd be hanging out in Kentucky, I'm not sure.
• A concert version of A Christmas Carol, "performed with a full symphony orchestra, choir, and rock/pop rhythm section," will be released on CD October 19. You can pre-order it now on Amazon.
• Great Expectations without Orlick or Compeyson? I can't quite imagine how that would work. . . .
• I'm not an Anne Rice fan, but I do like this quote from her Facebook page that a friend sent to me: "This magnificent novel, Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens, taught me how to write, and taught me to want to write. This is one of the first novels I ever read, and I go back to it almost every year. There are many editions for sale. If you haven't read this, by all means do."
• The upcoming film The Chimes now has a producer. Hollywood veteran Howard Rosenman has signed on.
• Here's yet another pub that Dickens made famous. Much more of this and I'll have to create a "pubs" tag.
• We've got 20 votes in the poll about which books to donate! If you haven't yet voted but you want to, make sure to do it by tomorrow night.

Um, what?

Press release from PRNewswire:

Hollywood film producer and founder of writemovies.com Alex Ross (The List, 2007- Warner Bros.) is delighted to announce his latest feature project THE CHIMES. The US$20m movie will focus on an almost cataclysmic love affair in the life of Oliver Twist author Charles Dickens:

When Dickens falls in love with beautiful mysterious Isabella he is drawn into her dark, dangerous world and risks everything to be with her, even his life.

Er -- back up there, boys. Isabella? Dark, dangerous world? Risks his life? It sounds like they started off with something that actually happened to Dickens and then took an abrupt left turn into sheer fantasy. And called the whole thing after one of his Christmas stories.

I don't really know what to think about this, folks. I'll check into it and see if I can find out more . . .

Update: A sparkly Dickens??