7 Quick Takes Friday

• The Northampton Chronicle and Echo has a piece about Holdenby House, used for Satis House in the upcoming Great Expectations miniseries.
• A press release from the BBC about upcoming programs touches on Great Expectations, spoof series Bleak Old Shop of Stuff, and various Dickensian documentaries.
• At SummitDaily.com, Patrick Williams points out, "Diligent reading of Dickens is a far better guarantee of high verbal SAT and GRE scores than all the drilling for vocabulary tests or Kaplan prep books -- take note, all students."
• BBC News talked to the curators of new Dickens exhibits at the Museum of London and the British Library.
• The Kansas City Star interviewed Andrea Warren, author of Charles Dickens and the Street Children of London.
• This article about the bicentennial mentions that the new radio adaptation of Martin Chuzzlewit is a "reworking" set in Mumbai, India.
• Speaking of Martin Chuzzlewit, which I'm still reading . . . you guys didn't tell me it had a character named Pip in it! Imagine my delight when I got to the line "Pip's our mutual friend." What a quintessentially Dickensian sentence (even if Dickens himself had no inkling of it at the time)!