Dickensblog

Lucinda Hawksley talks 'A Tale of Two Cities'

On Saturday, July 13, the Dickens Museum is sponsoring "A Tale of Two Cities: An Afternoon with Lucinda Dickens Hawksley," where Dickens's great-great-great-granddaughter and president of the Dickens Fellowship will read excerpts from the novel and lead a discussion. The event is free and can be attended in-person or online. Go here for all the details and to sign up!

TCM alert

A Tale of Two Cities (1935) will air on the channel at 5:45 p.m. Eastern today, as part of a birthday celebration for producer David O. Selznick. 

TCM alert

A Tale of Two Cities (1935) airs on the channel at 8 a.m. Eastern tomorrow morning, as part the 31 Days of Oscar celebration (it was nominated for Best Editing). 

Dickens gets caught up in school book purge

A Tale of Two Cities has gotten some attention recently -- not in a good way. It was one of nearly 3000 books pulled from school libraries in Escambia County, Florida, for review after being challenged for inappropriate content. Also pulled was an edition of David Copperfield "adapted for young readers." As were encyclopedias, dictionaries, Bible story books, and works by Agatha Christie and Emily Brontë, among others. More information is here, here, and here. (Note that different articles give different numbers, but as of January 11, the total appears to be around 2800.)

I try to keep politics off this blog as much as possible, but I suspect we would all agree that if your book review policy considers Charles Dickens a dangerous influence on the youth of America, you probably need to rethink it. 

'Collider' ranks Dickens film adaptations

This list of the top 20 features a few films I haven't seen yet, and a couple that I don't really care for, but I'm happy to see the 1958 A Tale of Two Cities, 2019's The Personal History of David Copperfield, and the 1951 Scrooge on there. The listmaker, Jeremy Urquhart, knows his Dickens films, and has put much more thought into this than such lists usually get.

TCM alert

A Tale of Two Cities (1935) will air at 3:30 p.m. Eastern tomorrow, as part of the network's "Summer under the Stars" salute to Ronald Colman.

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!

TCM alert

A Tale of Two Cities (1935) airs on the channel tomorrow at 12:15 p.m. Eastern.

TCM alerts

David Copperfield (1935) airs at noon Eastern today, and A Tale of Two Cities (1935) airs at 6 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday.

Keeping Christmas all the year

'Tis the season, as you know, when the world is rereading and rewatching A Christmas Carol. But the other day, inspired by a Twitter conversation about how Great Expectations is also a Christmas book (or at least part of it is), I went looking for Christmas references in other Dickens books as well. Interestingly, I found at least one reference in every single one of the novels! The majority of them were just passing references, but a few of them were significant. Besides Scrooge's Christmas ordeal, and the other Christmas books, we have ...

• The Christmas chapters in The Pickwick Papers, which include a goblin story that gives us a foretaste of the Carol
• David and Agnes getting engaged at Christmastime in David Copperfield
• Pip bringing Magwitch food, and later seeing him get arrested, on Christmas Day, in Great Expectations
• Edwin vanishing (and most likely murdered) on Christmas Eve in The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Occasionally, even a book that doesn't have a Christmas scene in it have film adaptations where Christmas scenes have been added! One well-known example is the 1935 A Tale of Two Cities, which places an important interaction between Sydney and Lucie on Christmas Eve. No doubt this was a nod to the Christmasy atmosphere that Dickens was known for. 

As Boze Herrington recently wrote of Dickens at All the (Dickensian) Year Round, "Christmas awoke something nameless and secret in him," something that makes it show up again and again in his stories as a pivotal time in people's lives. Watching for such incidences as we read him is one enjoyable way to "keep [Christmas] all the year," as Scrooge promises to do. And so, a merry Christmas to you all, not just today but always!