Dickensblog

Dickens and the supernatural

Smithsonian Magazine has an article on Dickens as a "fascinated skeptic" of supernatural phenomena. It's promoting the upcoming Dickens Museum exhibit To Be Read at Dusk: Dickens, Ghosts and the Supernatural, which will open in October.

Mendes to produce Dickens audio dramas

Acclaimed film and theater director Sam Mendes will produce three Dickens audio drama adaptations for Audible. First up will be Oliver Twist, due in November 2022; the other two titles have not yet been announced. The actors haven't yet been announced either, but all the adaptations will have "all-star" casts. I'll post more news when it comes out!

R.I.P., Bernard Cribbins

The British actor played Tommy Traddles in the 1956 David Copperfield, the BBC's first Dickens adaptation for television. He passed away yesterday at the age of 93. 

Dickens the intrepid traveler

Lucinda Hawksley gave a nice long interview to The Sunday Post to promote her newest book about her great-great-great-grandfather, Dickens and Travel: The Start of Modern Travel Writing. Here's an excerpt:

“The first trip on a steamship ... sounds absolutely terrifying. Dickens writes home and says that never again would he trust himself and his wife to a steamship, because it’s so frightening.

“It’s either far too heavily laden with coal at the beginning, or frighteningly unladen at the end. He also talks about the fact the chimneys belching out fire are so unstable that if you got caught in a storm, and they were knocked over, the whole ship would go up in flames.

“All these Victorian travellers were so brave. Today, no matter how much we think we’re intrepid, it’s nothing compared to putting yourself in these terrifying vessels and heading out to places unknown.”

Go here to read the full interview, and go here to order Lucinda's book!

R.I.P., David Warner

The British actor, who played Bob Cratchit in the 1984 A Christmas Carol and Sampson Brass in the 1975 musical film Mr. Quilp, passed away July 24 at age 80. (Thanks to Josh Sharpe for the tip.)

From the book pile

• The Dickens Boy by Thomas Keneally (Atria Books, 2022)
  
  A novel about Edward "Plorn" Dickens, sent to Australia in his teens to try to make something of himself after doing poorly in school, is a great idea. And acclaimed novelist Thomas Keneally (Booker-Prize-winning author of Schindler's List) would seem just the person to write such a novel. His descriptive writing is beautiful, effectively conveying the wonder and enchantment of a young Englishman encountering the sweeping Australian wilderness for the first time. And he handles Plorn's and his siblings' complicated relationship with their father with both realism and sensitivity. So it took me a while to figure out why I wasn't enjoying the book very much. 
  
  I eventually pinpointed two reasons. The first is mainly a matter of personal taste: The book has a loosely episodic structure, without much of a story arc or narrative drive. It's not pushing toward any goal, aside from Plorn's rather vague goal to learn to apply himself and please his father. There's nothing inherently wrong with that sort of structure, but it just doesn't appeal to me much. (There's a reason I prefer late Dickens to early Dickens.)
  
  The second reason is more on the micro level: the often stiff and stilted nature of Plorn's narration. His sentence structure at times feels positively upside down and backwards -- for instance: "The question of whether Father had left the girl anything proved to be part of Alfred's musings, and many people would have said, why not?"  Even in 1869, a more formal period, it beggars belief that an undereducated adolescent would talk like that. And the stiltednesss has the added effect of distancing us from the young man instead of feeling that we're really getting to know him. Keneally gets so much else right in this book, I don't know why he had trouble getting the voice right, but I couldn't help wishing he had made more of an effort in that direction. It would have improved the book so much.

Cast named for animated 'Christmas Carol'

Oliva Colman is super into Dickens these days -- along with playing Miss Havisham, she's also playing the Ghost of Christmas Past! Other cast members of the new Netflix animated film include Luke Evans as Scrooge, Jonathan Pryce as Jacob Marley, and Johnny Flynn as Bob Cratchit. See the full list (including some never-before-heard-of characters!) over at Flickering Myth.

First look at the new BBC/FX 'Great Expectations'

Two images from the production have been released, showing Olivia Colman as Miss Havisham, Fionn Whitehead as Pip, and Shalom Brune-Franklin as Estella.

New 'Bleak House' illustrations

Artist Gerry Mooney, an active member of the Dickensblog Facebook group, is offering a free download of the first seven chapters of Bleak House with his illustrations. He hopes to do a full version of the book someday, but this PDF version is his proof-of-concept. Gerry does beautiful work and his Dickens illustrations are a treat for the eye. Visit his website to get your free download! 

You can learn more about Gerry's ideas and process from this post he wrote for the Dickens Society blog.

A new Dickens/Bricusse collaboration

On its way to Netflix (no date announced yet) is a new European animated version of ... wait for it ... A Christmas Carol! I know, you're stunned. But this one has an interesting twist -- the songs were written by the late Leslie Bricusse, who, as you may remember, c0-wrote the songs for the 1970 film Scrooge. So I'm sure there will be some intriguing comparisons to make between his vision for the story from more than 50 years ago, and his more recent vision. And it will be nice to have one last set of songs from him.