Dickensblog

'A World Full of Dickens Stories': A review

By Tai French, guest blogger

A World Full of Dickens Stories: 8 Best-Loved Classic Tales Retold for Children by Angela McAllister (Frances Lincoln Children's Books, 2020)

The works of Charles Dickens, though marvelous, can be a tad daunting at first, especially for the young. With a dizzying array of characters, unfamiliar social mores and settings, and a wealth of subplots, a full-length Dickens novel can quickly overwhelm a novice or reluctant reader. Imagine how helpful a trusted guide could be, one who helps the reader keep track of the primary characters and follow the golden thread of the story through its twists and turns! A World Full of Dickens Stories is just such a faithful guide.

Good news for the Dickens Museum

The museum is now receiving some financial support from Britain's National Lottery Heritage Fund. Museum director Cindy Sughrue tells BBC News that the museum is "geared up to open as soon as possible over the summer."

Incidentally, the Dickens Society is running a fundraiser in which, when you donate to the charity of your choice, they'll give a matching donation to the Dickens Museum. Go here for details.

'Our Mutual Friend' webchat

As part of The Guardian's readalong of Our Mutual Friend, author and critic Kathryn Hughes will host a webchat on Monday. Go here to submit any questions you might like to ask her about the book or about Dickens in general!

Charles Dickens on slavery

As we know, slavery was one of the things that most offended Dickens when he first visited America. Washington Post writer Norman Leahy appeals to him while writing about the Confederate statues in Richmond, Va.: 

"Consider Charles Dickens, who visited Richmond in March 1842 as part of a tour of the United States and Canada. After a bumpy, soggy and occasionally harrowing coach ride to Fredericksburg, Dickens took the train to Richmond. It’s in this stretch of the journey he sees and feels the evil in the air:

"In this district, as in all others where slavery sits brooding (I have frequently heard this admitted, even by those who are its warmest advocates:) there is an air of ruin and decay abroad, which is inseparable from the system."

Read more here.

'David Copperfield' gets a U.S. release date

Armando Iannucci's The Personal History of David Copperfield will start with a limited release on August 14. As IndieWire puts it, "Picking this date tells us that Searchlight plans a New York/Los Angeles initial limited release followed by gradual roll-out in other markets. It wouldn’t do that without near-100 percent confidence that key theaters in both cities will be open." If all goes well, keep an eye out for it at a theater near you sometime after that!

Virtual tours of the Dickens Museum with Lucinda Hawksley

Let Charles Dickens's great-great-great-granddaughter show you around his old home! Lucinda Hawksley will lead a virtual tour on Thursday, June 18, and another on Friday, June 19, to raise money for the museum. Go here to find out how to sign up for the first tour, and go here for details on the second one!

From yesterday's commemoration

The Dickens Museum has posted a couple of videos that fans will want to see: one of an amazing light and sound installation that was projected onto Westminster Abbey for yesterday's anniversary, and another of a special greeting from members of the Dickens family.

Yesterday's virtual conference went great, and there should soon be some videos from that online as well!

On Dickens's death

"No writer of the age was more beloved than Dickens. Just as people had once clamored for the next installment of his serialized novels, they now sought new details about his life and death at 58. For months, the newspaper brimmed with stories about Dickens’s final hours, his funeral, his will, the auction of his art collection, even his estate sale, where a set of old flowerpots went for a guinea.

"On June 12, The Times followed its report of Dickens’s death with a melancholy editorial tribute to the man 'whose works are more or less associated with the events of our lives,' pointing out that 'people of middle age cannot but feel that they have "grown up," as it were, with Charles Dickens. The appearance of each successive story from his pen is linked with a thousand domestic recollections, for he was eminently the novelist of the household.'"

Tina Jordan, "When Dickens Died, America Mourned. Our Archives Tell the Story," The New York Times, June 7, 2020

(Image: The Empty Chair, painting by Sir Samuel Luke Fildes, 1870)

News roundup

On the eve of the 150th anniversary of Charles Dickens's death, a few items of interest:

• The Jersey Post is releasing a new set of eight stamps in honor of the occasion: "Created by Mark and Julie Wilkinson, the stamps have been designed to look like classic leather book covers and feature key scenes and characters from some of Dickens’ best-loved works." Here's the direct link to order.
• Country Life put together a lovely tribute to some of Dickens's greatest characters. Meanwhile, The Conversation did a "data analysis" to gain some insight on Dickens's methods of characterization.
• The Dickens Theatre Company, unable to perform their new play Dickens' Dream because of the lockdown, have put a short teaser video online (click "Continue reading" below to see it). Their hope is to perform the play later this year.

Hope to run into some of you at the virtual #Dickens150 conference tomorrow!

A new reproduction of the 'Oliver Twist' manuscript

SP Books has published a reproduction of the handwritten manuscript of Oliver Twist, with colored versions of George Cruikshank's illustrations and a new introduction by Simon Callow. It's a pricey but beautiful edition, especially valuable because of what it shows us about the changes Dickens made as he wrote the novel. As Craig Simpson observes in the Telegraph, "Charles Dickens’ classic work examining crime and poverty in Victorian Britain was self-censored to be less brutal about the relationship between Bill Sikes and Nancy, with offending words like 'damn' also removed from the text. . . . Callow writes that the more calm prose of the final version left 'more to the imagination', and also ironed out 'inconsistencies in the plot' after Dickens decided to make Nancy a more sympathetic character. 'Nancy would be the new, tragic heroine of the work,' Callow writes in the introduction to the book published by SP Books."