Dickensblog

Dickens in short

"AOL has teamed with Mark Burnett, publisher John Wiley & Sons and independent film production firm Coalition Films to co-develop a series of comedic video shorts based on the CliffsNotes Literature Guides. . . .

"Stories from the likes of Mark Twain, William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens will come to AOL.com this year as part of the partnership."

If they do it right, this could be good. Like the Reduced Shakespeare Company or something.

7 Quick Takes Friday

• A production of A Christmas Carol in Great Massingham, Norfolk County, England, raised £2,791 for East Anglia Children's Hospices. A Dickensblog Order of Merit to them for their hard work and kindness!
• A fifth-grade class in Garden City, New York, made their own movie based on A Christmas Carol.
• Linda Grant calls Bleak House a "book of a lifetime." Not a bad article, though I think she's a little off the mark in her remark about religion.
• Actor Lloyd Lee will play Dickens and several of his characters in the one-man show Educating Charlie -- Mr. Dickens Looks Back this April on the Isle of Wight.
• The Burlington (Vt.) Free Press has some interviews with the cast of a local production of Oliver! This is the first production of the show I've heard of where a girl has played the title character.
• "When theatre director Edward Lam was invited to create a piece for Hong Kong at the recent World Expo 2010 in Shanghai, a Charles Dickens novel popped up in his head." And why not?
• Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, released as a four-volume work in the 1860s, has been re-released. The Washington Post reports, "In Mayhew one encounters the real-life equivalents of such Charles Dickens characters as Fagin, the Jewish receiver of stolen goods; Krook, the rag-and-bottle-merchant; Jo, the sickly crossing sweeper; and the Artful Dodger, leader of a band of youthful pickpockets."

I'll say

"Dickens, by the way, is much funnier than any American sitcom."

Dean Close, Vinton Today

Happy birthday to us!

Dickensblog is two years old today!

Thanks for helping to make it another great year!

Report from the Dickens Festival

Some great stories and pictures here!

You guys! Another adaptation!

But it's still not David Copperfield. (I'm so sorry, Nina.) It's Edwin Drood, and it's going to air on BBC Four.

But that's only the tip of the iceberg, because it seems there's going to be "a BBC-wide celebration" of the bicentennial! We're also getting new BBC radio adaptations of A Tale of Two Cities (well, radio's better than nothing, I guess) and Martin Chuzzlewit. And . . . possibly more? That's only my speculation, but keep your fingers crossed. There are still two other BBCs besides One and Four, after all!

Dickens vs. Trollope

Dickens gets the advantage in this article by Simon Heffer -- which makes me VERY happy. Not that I actually dislike Trollope, but I recently finished reading He Knew He Was Right (not to mention watching The Way We Live Now) and, well, Heffer is right. Dickens did do everything better.

(Cue the Trollopians to come galloping down on me like the wrath of God . . .)

Merry (late) Christmas to me!

Just wanted to share with you a late Christmas present that a friend gave me today! It's a poster of my favorite film version of ATOTC.

Maybe I'll hang it near Dickens's Dream!

The art of enjoying everybody

Smollett was coarse; but Smollett was also cruel. Dickens was frequently horrible; he was never cruel. The art of Dickens was the most exquisite of arts: it was the art of enjoying everybody. Dickens, being a very human writer, had to be a very human being; he had his faults and sensibilities in a strong degree; and I do not for a moment maintain that he enjoyed everybody in his daily life. But he enjoyed everybody in his books: and everybody has enjoyed everybody in those books even till to-day. His books are full of baffled villains stalking out or cowardly bullies kicked downstairs. But the villains and the cowards are such delightful people that the reader always hopes the villain will put his head through a side window and make a last remark; or that the bully will say one thing more, even from the bottom of the stairs.

G. K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature, quoted by Kevin Belmonte in The Quotable Chesterton (Thomas Nelson, 2011), p. 62.

From the book pile: Great-granddaughter edition, part two

Continuing from yesterday. (By the way, I shall continue to refer to Monica Dickens by her first name, as it would be a little confusing around here to call her "Dickens"!)