Dickensblog

'The Guardian's' June Dickens club: Cast your vote!

Sam Jordison of The Guardian will be leading a Dickens readalong in June, and he's asking for readers to vote on which book! Head over there (you should be able to register for an online account for free) and tell him which book you want in the comments section. There's already a very lively discussion (five pages' worth!) going on there, and by my rough estimate, Our Mutual Friend is in the lead so far. 

I'm not certain when the voting closes, so if you want to participate, hurry and get yours in!

It's about 'time'

At Book Riot, Kathleen Keenan does a deep dive into the famous "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" line -- doing us all a great favor, as there's a regrettable tendency for modern writers to quote the line without thinking about its meaning. And boy, does it have meaning. As Keenan says, 

Looking back on a turbulent era of history, Dickens is aware that we all tend to claim our current era is the most difficult, the most unsettled, the most interesting. But, this sentence points out, his contemporary Victorian readers aren’t the first to think that way. Why, not so long ago, in the 1780s, look at how people thought of the times they lived in, this sentence seems to suggest. This is one way Dickens uses to create a parallel between his readers and these figures of the past. At the end of this very long sentence, he even says it explicitly: “the period was so far like the present period” in this regard.

That’s one reason why this line holds up so well: every new generation thinks their struggles are uniquely difficult. 

Go here to read more.

Visit the Dickens Museum online

The Charles Dickens Museum is now displaying images of many of its items online -- a project that began before the shutdown but turned out to be very "timely," according to curator Louisa Price. (A classic Dickensian coincidence, or Dickensidence, as we sometimes call them around here!) Go take a look, and while you're there, remember that the Museum could really use some donations right now, if you can spare anything!

More #Dickens150 conference news

I'm excited to announce that I'll be speaking at #Dickens150! My topic is "Heart of Darkness? Dickens in Dialogue with Himself via H.G. Parry's The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep." The full conference schedule is posted here (all times are BST, British Summer Time), and registration is still open, so I hope to be able to say hello to some of you there!

Steven Knight's next Dickens adaptation announced

The next Dickensian miniseries from the team behind the BBC/FX Christmas Carol will be . . . wait for it . . . Great Expectations. (It never seems to occur to anyone to give us a new Barnaby Rudge or Martin Chuzzlewit or Dombey and Son). Personally, I just hope it's a bit less grim than their previous outing.