Dickensblog

A Dickens of a reading

ReadingEagle.com reports on the North Carolina Dickens Fellowship reading competition, focusing on high school junior Morgan Kauffman, who was a finalist with her reading from The Pickwick Papers. Morgan hopes to be able to perform at a Dickens festival in London this December. Best wishes to her!

7 Quick Takes Friday

• Naxos is releasing all 16 of Dickens's major novels as audiobooks, in both abridged and unabridged versions, for the bicentennial. Visit their page for more information and to download their Dickens podcasts. And The Dabbler blog is exclusively serializing their abridged version of The Pickwick Papers.
• Actor Stephen Fry gave away free copies of A Tale of Two Cities on the set of his new film for World Book Night, earlier this week.
• Speaking of free books, the library system in Sheffield, England, is giving away 1500 free copies of Oliver Twist in honor of the bicentennial. Very nice, but since it's Sheffield, shouldn't it be David Copperfield instead? (You know, "Confusion to Brooks of Sheffield!")
• And speaking of Oliver Twist, Robin Stone of the Globe and Mail tells a terrific story about how she got both herself and her nine-year-old son hooked on the children's edition of that book. Kudos to both of them!
• Here's an interesting tale about why Dickens gave away his personal copy of David Copperfield.
• Rabbit Run Theater in Madison, Ohio, is going to be doing three different Dickens plays this summer and fall, and the nearby Lodge at Geneva-on-the-Lake is offering special packages that include overnight stays and tickets to see the performances. Read all about it here.
• Filming has started on The Invisible Woman. Can't say I'm too thrilled about seeing Dickens get the National Enquirer treatment, which is what I'm afraid this is going to be. In other movie news, the new independent film Nancy, Please tells the story of a graduate student who gets into a violent conflict with his old roommate over, of all things, a copy of Little Dorrit. Here's an interview with the director.

7 Quick Takes Friday

• A "Dickens' Legacy" conference will be held tomorrow at Cambridge University.
• Simon Callow has come to terms with the fact that Shakespeare, not Dickens, will be "the chosen poster boy for British culture" during the London Olympics. (I, however, have not.)
• Portsmouth is doing special "Discover Dickens" tours in honor of the bicentennial.
• An art show in New Zealand is showing watercolors inspired by Dickens, by the artist Paul Braddon.
• Christopher Gellert, in the Washington Square News, dares to suggest that "in his day, [Dickens] might have been considered as campy as Stephanie Meyer." BITE YOUR TONGUE, SIR.
• In a more palatable comparison, the New Yorker's Maria Tatar examines the tradition of child deaths in literature, from Dickens to Stowe to The Hunger Games.
• The Gravesend Messenger reports on the new Charles Dickens Ale, created by The Leather Bottle pub that was featured in The Pickwick Papers.

'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.

Penguin and Pickwick

Penguin has been named "the official publishing partner for Dickens 2012." They'll be publishing a new biography, a nice-looking special-edition boxed set, and an abridged version of David Copperfield (No, no, no! You don't abridge Dickens! Ever!), and supporting city reads in London and Portsmouth. (The first link above also lists some forthcoming books about Dickens from other publishers.)

And within Penguin itself, some of the staffers have decided this would be a good time to read all his books. Copywriter manager Louise Wilder reports on the project here, describing how in the course of one book -- The Pickwick Papers -- she went from feeling "terrified" to feeling "Dickens is going to be my friend." In fact, she's "already starting to get quite defensive of him." I know that feeling. :-) Welcome to the Dickensian Side, Louise! We're delighted to have you.

Speaking of 'Martin Chuzzlewit' . . .

I just came across this lovely passage from G. K. Chesterton's introduction to it:

We go for a particular novel to Dickens as we go for a particular inn. We go to the sign of the Pickwick Papers. We go to the sign of the Rudge and Raven. We go to the sign of the Old Curiosities. We go to the sign of the Two Cities. We go to each or all of them according to what kind of hospitality and what kind of happiness we require.

Rather unfortunately, Chesterton goes on to argue that Martin Chuzzlewit is the exception to the rule, thanks to its "melancholy" feel. Still, the imagery is brilliant and, I think, profoundly true.

And Chesterton does go on to say, "He poured into this book genius that might make the mountains laugh, invention that juggled with the stars." So there's that!

7 Quick Takes Friday

• The bicentennial books just keep coming! TheBookseller.com highlights a few Dickens-related books that are due in or around 2012.
• Speaking of bicentennial books, John Hendricks reports that the picture book A Boy Called Dickens, which I posted about back in April, is finished and will be published in January. Don't miss the wonderful illustrations in his "sneak peek" post.
• Entertainment site Word and Film has an article about the upcoming "bounty of Dickens adaptations." They're asking readers to weigh in on which other Dickens films they'd like to see, by which filmmakers.
• Ralph Fiennes is on board to direct a film about Dickens and Ellen Ternan, though he has a few other projects to do first -- including, as you'll recall, playing Magwitch.
• The Young Shakespeare Players of Madison, Wisconsin -- a group of "young actors, and a few intrepid adults" -- are putting on a production of Our Mutual Friend this month. It sounds like a daunting task for a cast of youngsters, but then, if they're used to Shakespeare, they can surely tackle Dickens! Read about the production here and here -- you can even watch a few video clips from it -- and also check out this delightful OMF blog they're running.
• This poignant story about a Canadian bookmobile for disadvantaged people includes an anecdote about a homeless man who loves Dickens. I imagine Dickens would have appreciated that.
• And finally, Cyril Ornadel, composer of the 1963 musical Pickwick, has died at the age of 86. Tributes are here and here. R.I.P.

The convincingly good human being

So I'm still laboriously making my way through Michael Slater's Dickens biography. As the quote below will show you, I haven't got very far, which is no fault of Slater's; rather, it's due to my bad habit of trying to read about 947 books at once. Still, even though it gives me away, I wanted to share the passage because I like what it says about Dickens's gift for writing a certain kind of character.

With Pickwick Dickens knew by now just where he was going. He kept Mr. Winke's love-story on the boil in this May number (Pickwick XIV) as the minor comic plot and filled it out with yet another variation on the reluctant-duellists joke, while his imagination warmed to the work of continuing the development of Pickwick himself into a specimen of that most difficult to portray of all fictional characters, the convincingly good human being.

Michael Slater, Charles Dickens, Chapter 5

7 Quick Takes Friday

• Lee Jackson of the blog The Cat's Meat Shop has a short piece by Dickens's son Alfred about the real-life crossing sweep who was probably "the original of poor Joe [sic] in 'Bleak House.'" The piece is an excerpt from an article that originally ran in Nash's.  
• Jackson has also created a map of "the many flats, houses, farms and blacking factories in which Charles Dickens lived, worked and played."
• Here's an interview with Tanika Gupta, writer of the adaptation of Great Expectations set in India. The play is currently touring Britain.
• Remember that letter opener that Dickens had made out of his dead cat's paw? . . . Yeah, I was trying to forget that too. But it's one of the objects that will be part of an overnight scavenger hunt in the New York Public Library next month. Go here for information on how to participate.
• Celebrated author Salman Rushdie opened a recent lecture at Duke University with a tribute to Dickens.
• Jonesing for some Dickensian screencaps? LiveJournal user chrs_vg has a "Project Charles Dickens" that includes downloadable caps from 13 different miniseries. Go here to check out the selection!
• And finally . . . we've seen "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" used in many different ways, but I don't think we've ever seen or heard it used quite like this.
  
  

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.