Dickensblog

Jefferson Mays's 'Christmas Carol' comes to Broadway

Got another teaser trailer for you today! This one is for Jefferson Mays's one-man version of A Christmas Carol, which opens at Broadway's Nederlander Theater on November 8. Go here for tickets! 

New 'Chimes' audio drama

The Chimes -- Dickens's "lost" Christmas story, according to the publicity -- is getting a full-cast audio adaptation, starring Toby Jones. It can be pre-ordered here; there's no word yet on whether it will be available at Audible or other outlets. Here's the teaser trailer:

 

Dickens the diva?

Eleven unpublished Dickens letters are on display at the Dickens Museum, and also available to view online (go here and type "archives and manuscripts" into the search engine). Among them is one in which he complains about Sunday postal service being discontinued in his village of Higham -- described by two different commentators, Pete Orford and Adela Suliman, as "diva" behavior. Was Dickens being a diva or justifiably frustrated? Read the letter and judge for yourself!

In Dickens's shadow

Writing in Crime Reads, novelist Simon Toyne graciously acknowledges his -- and every writer's -- debt to Dickens: "Just as the bones of Dickens’ London are still visible beneath the flesh of the modern city as you walk through Chancery, or down Fleet Street, or through Covent Garden, or any of the stone lined lanes of the old city, so the shadow of Dickens falls across the work of any writer who dares to tread where he once trod." Read more here.

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 stiltedness 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.