Dickensblog

From the book pile

We'll start off this round of reviews with some fiction.

• A Tale of Two Murders and Grave Expectations by Heather Redmond (Kensington Books, 2019). For her "A Dickens of a Crime" series, mystery author Redmond takes young journalist Charles Dickens as her detective, investigating crimes featuring plots and characters that will one day be repurposed for his novels. (The next installment, A Christmas Carol Murder, is due out in September.) Dickens investigates the strange cases that pop up around London with the help of the pretty and vivacious young Catherine Hogarth, along with his brother Fred and other characters, both real and fictional. Those who know Dickens's works well will enjoy the copious Dickensian Easter eggs scattered throughout these books; others may simply enjoy the mysteries and learn a few things about Dickens's life and world. (And if watching Charles and Catherine's relationship blossom makes your heart ache a little, well, my friend, you're not the only one.)
• Marley by Jon Clinch (Atria Books, 2019). Clinch is without question a fine writer, and one who clearly knows the original Christmas Carol forwards and backwards. He brings a prodigious imagination to bear on Dickens's characters and plotlines in writing this prequel, in which he takes the intriguing path of making Scrooge a good man who goes wrong through the noblest of motives -- trying to outwit and rein in his unabashedly crooked partner, Marley. The maneuverings and one-upmanship between the two men, and the other characters who get swept up in it all, make Marley a fascinating tale in its own right. And yet Clinch's almost unrelentingly bleak tone in this novel left a bitter aftertaste, with only the tiniest, almost imperceptible drop of hope to temper it. I was positively appalled by the fate he devised for Fan -- a fate not only cruel in itself, but one brought on by an unfathomably cruel ongoing deception of her. I can't deny Clinch's great creativity and skill -- but I can't help wishing they'd gone in a different direction. 

More reviews coming shortly! (Note: As Amazon is understandably tied up at the moment, I'll be linking to publishers' sites and other booksellers' sites instead for the foreseeable future.)

Fireside reading and a character competition

Those book reviews are coming, I swear, but first a couple of quick news items:

• Actor and audiobook narrator Gildart Jackson will begin reading from Great Expectations at 8 Eastern this evening at @firesidereading on Instagram. He plans to read a chapter a day.
• The Journalists' Charity, co-founded by Dickens, is honoring the 150th anniversary of his death by asking for "written portraits of a modern-day Dickens character." The Guardian has more.  

'The Usborne Complete Dickens': A review

By Cody M. Quanbeck, Guest Blogger

The Usborne Complete Dickens (not to be confused with another, shorter book from the Usborne Company, Illustrated Stories from Dickens) retells all of Charles Dickens’s major novels in short story form for younger readers, as well as A Christmas Carol because you can’t leave out A Christmas Carol. Each story is preceded by an illustration by Maria Surducan, showing all of the major characters with brief descriptions of them, a helpful tool for readers having trouble keeping track of the stories’ giant casts.

The team of seven writers stay faithful to Dickens’ stories, characters and themes. I noticed specific jokes from the books were included, like the board’s response to Mr. Gamfield’s offer to take Oliver Twist off their hands. There is even some attempt to have the first and last sentences of each retelling correspond to the first and last sentences of their book. David Copperfield and Great Expectations are still told by first-person narrators. Bleak House is told partly by a third-person narrator and partly by a first-person one. Even the quickly abandoned first-person narrator of The Old Curiosity Shop is included.

Dickens conference updates

The Dickens Fellowship and the Dickens Society have announced that they will "bow to the inevitable" and cancel this summer's joint symposium in London. Also, the Dickens Project is pushing this summer's Dickens Universe to next summer.

News roundup

Just wanted to share a few news items before beginning the book reviewing:

• The Dickens Museum is, unsurprisingly, closed indefinitely, but remains active on social media. Actor Dominic Gerrard, who has performed a one-man Christmas Carol there, has done a reading of the first chapter of A Tale of Two Cities to raise money for the Museum.
• The joint Dickens Fellowship/Dickens Society Symposium in London in July is still scheduled to go ahead, but organizers are monitoring things and will make a final decision in May.
• In the New Yorker, Amy Davidson Sorkin argues, "Esther Summerson is one of the great heroines of literature, in part because she understands the vital importance of social distancing and isolation, even when it is hard."
• Phyllis Rose is re-releasing her 1983 book Parallel Lives, which focuses on five Victorian couples, including Charles and Catherine Dickens. In an interview with the Guardian, Rose argues that "is disappointing, and incredibly small-minded" to "cancel" great writers like Dickens over their bad behavior. The new edition of her book can be ordered here.   
• The TV series "Great British Menu" has a children's literature theme this year, in honor of the 150th anniversary of Dickens's death. (Seemed like a bit of a stretch to me too, but apparently it has something to do with Oliver Twist being the first child protagonist. Anyway, I'd never carp about a show honoring Dickens for any reason!)
• Dr. Pete Orford is beginning a Hard Times readalong on April 1.

'David Copperfield' release delayed

The Personal History of David Copperfield is one of several movies that will have its release date pushed back because of the coronavirus quarantine. I'll keep an eye out and let you know when a new release date is set. 

I hope all of you are safe and well, and doing better than Mr. Meagles did in quarantine ("Why, I'd as soon have a spit put through me, and be stuck upon a card in a collection of beetles"). In the days ahead I plan to write some of those long-overdue book reviews I've been promising you for years -- literally years! Yikes! -- for a bit of entertainment. If any of you could use some diversion and would like to write a guest post for the blog on anything Dickensian, let me know in the comment section below, and we'll see about making that happen! 

TCM alert

David Copperfield (1935) airs at 7:30 this morning. (Sorry I wasn't aware of this earlier!)

'Bleak House' at Blackwell's

Honestly, what could be better than a Dickens musical in a bookshop?

Big 'Tale of Two Cities' news!

If you were in the Dickensblog Facebook group or on Twitter today, you might have seen me celebrating the news that A Tale of Two Cities is finally, finally getting a TV adaptation, written by Jack Thorne (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, His Dark Materials). As others pointed out to me, we've been burned before, but this time I choose to believe it's the real thing. It has to be the real thing sometime, right?

And I'm glad that it's not the team behind the BBC/FX Christmas Carol doing it. Although oddly enough, it struck me at the time that that team might actually do a better job with ATOTC, as there are already plenty of dark, ugly secrets in that story for them to dive into. Still, as you know, I found their work pretty bleak and depressing, and I'm hoping for better things from Thorne.

Feel free to use the comments section below for dreamcasting! :-) 

 

(P.S. Thorne also wrote the adaptation of Christmas Carol that just ran on Broadway. Somehow I missed that!!)

Purse dogs are out, purse letters are in

If you'd told me that the next Dickens scandal would involve designer handbags containing small pieces of a letter he wrote . . . I'd probably have doubted you.

And yet, here we are.

(Just in case you should want one of these, all you have to do is scrape together 2,750 Euros!)