Dickensblog

TCM alert

Great Expectations (1946) airs at 7:45 a.m. Eastern tomorrow.

'The Signalman' reappears

On August 5, Londoners will be able to see a long-lost 1965 TV version of Dickens's "The Signalman" as part of a special program, "Missing Believed Wiped," at BFI Southbank. Click here to read more about the program, and click here for schedules and tickets!

TCM alert

A Christmas Carol (1938, with Reginald Owen) airs at 2 a.m. Eastern tonight, as part of the network's "Christmas in July" programming.

It was the best of Universes

Dickens Universe, the Dickens Project's annual event, begins today and runs all week, with a focus on my favorite novel, A Tale of Two Cities! I'm attending virtually this year. Hello to all my fellow attendees -- I hope everyone has fun!

'Charles Dickens and Georgina Hogarth': A review

Charles Dickens and Georgina Hogarth: A curious and enduring relationship by Christine Skelton (Manchester University Press, 2023)

Of all the unanswered questions and ongoing disputes about Charles Dickens's life, one of the most intriguing is this: When Charles and his wife, Catherine, separated, why did Catherine's sister Georgina, who had been living with them for years, stay with Charles? Christine Skelton of the University of Birmingham attempts to answer that question with her new book exploring the connection between the novelist and his mysterious sister-in-law. In some ways she's able to throw light on it, but in other ways, it feels as if the mystery's only deepened.

Dolly and the Barbie doll

Seems like everything has a connection to Barbie right now -- and Dickens is no exception! Check out Atlas Obscura's article on the link between Barbie and Barnaby Rudge's Dolly Varden.

Zadie Smith on the inescapability of Dickens

In the current issue of The New Yorker, award-winning British novelist Zadie Smith explains why there was no keeping Dickens out of her upcoming historical novel, The Fraud:

"About halfway through my research, his name started leaping up out of the footnotes and into the main body of the text, as a real-life actor in the events I was concerned with, and it became clear to me that in order to tell the whole of my true story there was really no way to entirely avoid Mr. Charles Dickens making an actual appearance in my actual pages. ... Dickens was everywhere, like weather.

"Sometimes, in writing, you have to give up control, take a Zen attitude, and go where you're being led, which is often right back to where you came from. So I said to Mr. Dickens: Look. You can have a walk-on part, but then I am killing you in the following chapter, straightaway. You won't be hanging around and you won't be making any witty speeches or imparting any wisdom. I was as good as my word, killing him in a paragraph, in a very brief, un-Dickensian chapter titled 'Dickens Is Dead!' Immediately, I felt that sense of catharsis which people often believe writing brings but which I myself have experienced only rarely. Look at me! (I said to myself.) I just killed Dickens! (By describing his sudden death and subsequent burial at Westminster Abbey.) But, not long after I wrote that triumphant scene, for practical reasons (a flashback) Charles made his inevitable return, appearing as a younger and even more irrepressible force than he had been forty pages earlier. At that point, I gave up. I let him pervade my pages, in the same way he stalks through nineteenth-century London. He's there in the air and the comedy and the tragedy and the politics and the literature. He's there where he had no business being (for example, in debates about the future of Jamaica). He's there as a sometimes oppressive, sometimes irresistible, sometimes delightful, sometimes overcontrolling influence, just as he was in life. Just as he has always been in my life."

The whole article is worth a read. If you haven't read too many New Yorker articles online yet this month, you should be able to access it for free!

More 'Expectations' in the works

The never-ending flow of Great Expectations retellings and spinoffs continues! This time it's Expectations, a contemporary sequel of sorts that morphs into a murder mystery. Chris Robert Riegel directs, and Callan McAuliffe and Blu Hunt star. Deadline Hollywood has more.