Dickensblog

7 Quick Takes Friday

• I called it, I called it! Just a week and a half after I suggested watching for Dickens references on CBS's Person of Interest, they obligingly gave us one. Harold Finch rattled off the title, author, publication dates, and a one-sentence summary of Our Mutual Friend after having been drugged, a feat I'm not at all sure I could accomplish myself. Well played, sir!
• BBC Daytime has commissioned an updated adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby, to air in the fall. Instead of a boarding school, Nicholas (or "Nick") will work in a home for the elderly.
• London is doing its first Cityread, and the book they've chosen is Oliver Twist. Read all about the event here!
• As it happens, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is also featuring Oliver Twist in their One Book/One Community event. Danny Heitman of the Advocate has a nice piece about that here.
• A group of teen artists in New York has put together a special exhibit inspired by the bicentennial, called "Sketching the City."
• How's this for a prize? To raise money for the restoration of his Swiss chalet, the Rochester and Chatham Dickens Fellowship is raffling off a strand of Dickens's hair!
• Speaking of raffles, don't forget to enter ours! We don't have anything quite that cool, but we do have a copy of the Great Expectations miniseries, and your money will go to help either sick kids or human trafficking victims -- your choice.

Win a copy of the 'Great Expectations' miniseries!

We're raffling off one DVD copy of the Original U.K. Edition of Great Expectations to raise money for the Dickensblog Charity Fundraiser. Here's all you have to do:

1. Pick one of the fundraising pages in our readathon: Mo's (for the Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital), Trynstje's (also for the hospital), or mine (for the Somaly Mam Foundation against sex trafficking).

2. Make a donation. (My page has a $10 minimum; I don't think the others have any minimum.) Here's a currency converter if you need one.

3. Leave a comment on this post to let me know about your donation. I'll confirm it by checking the person's fundraising page.

And that's it -- you're automatically entered. The winner's name will be drawn and announced on Monday, April 9, at 6 P.M. Eastern.

Thanks to PBS for donating the DVD. They've asked me to provide you with a link to their Charles Dickens Collection (Check out that Dickens doll! How cute is that!?), and to let you know that all purchases at their online shop help support PBS programming.

Now that's dedication

To raise funds for the Alzheimer's Society, 61-year-old Iain Dempster will run the London Marathon dressed as a Victorian gentleman and reading aloud from the works of Dickens.

We haven't given out a Dickensblog Order of Merit in a while, but if Mr. Dempster doesn't deserve one, I don't know who does. Consider it bestowed. And on a more practial note, if you want to sponsor him in the marathon, you can do so at this link.

(Speaking of fundraising, watch this site for a new opportunity in the Dickensblog Charity Fundraiser, coming in the next few days!)

Dickensian rumor of the day

"Charles Dickens slept facing North. He thought it improved his writing."

So says the Pakistan Daily Times. I wonder if it's true. I mean, I know EVERYTHING is true on the Internet ;-) , but this is a new one on me.

Miss Havisham in 'Parade'

Gillian Anderson has a short interview in this week's Parade. Of course they ask her the same old question (aren't you too young for this role?), but if you're interested in seeing how she answers it this time, here you go!

New DVDs available for pre-order

The Region 1 Great Expectations DVD releases April 3, and the Region 1 Edwin Drood DVD on May 1. Both can be pre-ordered on Amazon.

From the book pile, part 2

A Child's Journey with Dickens by Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin (Nabu Press, 2010. Originally published in 1912.)

Kate Douglas Wiggin would become well-known as the author of the children's novel Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. But in 1868 she was a child of eleven, longing to see her idol, Charles Dickens. (She and her family had named "almost every living thing" on the farm "after one of Dickens's characters.")

When he came to America, her mother went to hear a reading, but Kate wasn't allowed to go. She did go to town with her mother, but the tickets were so expensive ("there was a general feeling in the community that any one who paid it would have to live down a reputation for riotous extravagance forever afterward") that no one even thought of taking her along to the reading."If any martyr in Fox's 'Book' ever suffered more poignant anguish than I, I am heartily sorry for him," Wiggin writes, "yet my common sense assured me that a child could hardly hope to be taken on a week's junketing to Charlestown, and expect any other entertainment to be added to it for years to come."

Can you imagine? I think our cultural philosophy about children and pleasures has changed considerably since then -- fortunately for the children!

Anyway, little Kate had the last word in that situation, because on the train to Charlestown . . . guess who she ran into? And ended up sitting next to, and had a wonderful conversation with?

From the book pile, part 1

Becoming Dickens by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011).
Rather than write a conventional biography, Douglas-Fairhurst focuses on Dickens's early years, up through 1838 and the beginning of Nicholas Nickleby, in order to explore the making of him as a man and an artist. Through Dickens's works, he traces the various forces -- his culture, his family, his education, and so forth -- that shaped his life and his voice. It's an interesting approach and works pretty well on the whole, though sometimes it leads the author to give far too much weight to trifling details. Thus, from a passing reference to a mouse that drowned in ink in Dickens's essay "Our School," we get this: ". . . The detail about drowning in black ink carried far more troubling associations. The mouse that might have achieved greater things was like a small dark shadow of the boy who might have achieved far less if his life had taken a different turn."

. . . Really? I'm all in favor of an approach that helps us remember not to take Dickens for granted, but too much of this sort of thing starts to look like pure melodrama.

But when he's not straining too hard for effects like this, Douglas-Fairhurst provides a lively and readable account of Dickens's development. In particular, his emphasis on the work (as opposed to spending the bulk of the time on the life) is the kind of thing I happen to enjoy in a biography, so I can recommend this one.

(Review copy obtained from the publisher.)

Tomorrow: A Child's Journey with Dickens by Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin.

Is 'Person of Interest' a Dickensian show?

I know what some of you are thinking: My Dickensian obsession has finally run away with me and made me start seeing echoes of Dickens everywhere. No, that's not it.

Or maybe you're thinking that I'm so excited about PoI becoming a success and getting renewed that I'm celebrating it everywhere, even on a blog about a totally different subject. That's not it either. (Well, maybe just a little.)

I actually first had the thought a few weeks ago. More and more on PoI, it's becoming clear that all institutions -- government, the military, the police, the business world -- are riddled with corruption, and that it's up to a few good individuals to counter the massive institutional evil. Sounds a lot like mid- to late Dickens, don't you think?  Think of "They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and in shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted, and chafed, and made their usual uproar."

And we do know that J. J. Abrams is interested in Dickens, and that he and the other minds behind LOST worked references to Dickens into that show. It really does make me wonder if there are some Dickensian ideas at work here.

It's all conjecture right now, of course. But should we one day spot Michael Emerson's bookish Harold Finch with a copy of Little Dorrit under his arm -- let's just say, I won't be surprised.

Gad's Hill opens

. . . as the Dickens Museum closes.