Dickensblog

Dickens Fellowship virtual conference

If the virtual Dickens Universe doesn't provide enough Dickens for you in July, consider attending the virtual Dickens Fellowship Conference as well! The event will be held July 16-18. Information, including whom to contact about registering, can be found here. 

Dickens and Easter

I hope all of you who celebrate it had a very happy Easter. The Dickens Society had a fun Twitter thread today (with some pretty cool illustrations) examining all the continuities and contradictions in Dickens's ideas about how to celebrate the holiday -- apparently he liked a big celebration but he also preferred quiet! Start here and scroll down to read the whole thing.

Happy Easter!

In honor of the holiday, the Dickens Museum is offering special "Easter Explorers" virtual family tours this week. Click here for all the details!

Registration opens for Dickens Universe

The Dickens Universe will be going virtual again this summer, running July 26-30. The registration page is here. Early bird registration is $100 with the promo code EARLYBIRD; after April 20, the cost rises to $150. This year the conference will focus on A Christmas Carol. 

TCM alert

Sorry I'm getting this alert up super late, but Great Expectations (1946) airs at 2 p.m. Eastern, as part of the channel's birthday tribute to director David Lean!

'An offering of thanks'

Algis Valiunas has an excellent article in the new issue of First Things titled "The Gospel According to Dickens" (not related to my book of a similar title!). A sample: 

TCM alert

Oliver! will air tonight on the channel at 8 p.m. Eastern. 

Call for submissions

From Sara Malton at the Dickens Society:

"Dickens Quarterly invites submissions for a special issue on Dickens and Race. Many approaches to the topic may be envisaged, including but not limited to: representations of racial difference in Dickens’s fiction and non-fiction; Dickens’s encounters with racial difference in his personal and professional life; Dickens and slavery; Dickens, race, and empire; racially inflected or suggestive language, imagery, and allusions in Dickens’s work; the reception of Dickens’s writing within diverse racial and ethnic communities and contexts; racial difference in neo-Dickensian re-writings and adaptations of Dickens’s work for stage and screen (especially when these prompt new insights into Dickens’s own authorship); race in relation to gender and other forms of difference or othering in Dickens’s work; Dickens, race, and present-day debates about canons, curricula, and the moral and political impact of literature.

 

"Recently updated guidelines for contributors to Dickens Quarterly may be viewed here:

https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/dickens-quarterly/contributor-guidelines-articles"

 

I got Sara to ask Dominic Rainsford, the general editor, if there was a deadline for submissions. So far, no deadline has been given. They're just going to wait and see how many pieces come in.

Calls for papers

Here's one for "Dickens and Decadence," a September conference at the University of Stockholm; and here's one for papers on "Polyphonic Dickens" at the 2022 MLA Annual Convention. Thanks to Sara Malton of the Dickens Society for the tip!

Dickens's door

Atlas Obscura has a fun little piece about the door and mirror that are all that's left of Dickens's stay at the Parker House Hotel in Boston.