Dickensblog

Dickens & Company

The OUPblog at Oxford University Press has an interesting new post about Dickens's frequent collaborations with other authors. Here's an excerpt: 

"In this aspect of his editorial and authorial life, Dickens was often less autocratic and bullying than scholar[s] have recognized. He wrote less than a full third of the total amount of prose and verse in the Christmas numbers, and he often didn’t get his way. Dickens printed endings he did not like under his own name, asked another person to co-write more than one frame story, allowed yet another person to decide upon the ordering of stories, and included a poem that approves of cannibalism in stark contrast to his own other published work on the subject. As often as Dickens is defensive or controlling, he is playful and self-conscious about the collaborative dynamics between himself and his contributors."

Go here for more!

Charles Dickens and the decline of journalism

I don't often use this blog to comment on current affairs, but a recent news story about Dickens illustrates the problems with modern-day journalism so well, it's hard to pass up the opportunity to point it out.

A letter from Dickens to author Florence Marryat has recently been discovered and is going up for auction. In this letter, Dickens rejected a piece that she submitted to All the Year Round. Apparently she had asked him to provide an extensive critique of the piece, which he emphatically declined to do: "Surely that is scarcely reasonable. . . . You have no idea of the labor inseparable from the editing of such a Journal as All The Year Round, when you suppose it within the bounds of possibility that those who discharge such duties can give critical reasons for the rejection of papers."

Various papers, reporting on the finding of the letter, chose, as papers will too often do, to sensationalize it. The Telegraph headlined it "Unseen Charles Dickens letter reveals rude retort to fan"; the Independent, "Never-before-seen Charles Dickens letter reveals rude response to fan."

A few problems with this take on things:

The great contributor hunt

Jeremy Parrott, who discovered the annotated All the Year Round that made headlines last year, has some fun stories to share about his research on the various contributors to the magazine.

More on Dickens's 'All the Year Round' annotations

The discovery of Dickens's notes identifying various All the Year Round authors has been making headlines all over the place! Here are stories from The New York Times, The Guardian, The A.V. Club, The Telegraph, BBC News, God and the Machine -- and The Independent has more here, here, and here. The Independent also ran an essay called "What Is Sensational?" that had long been attributed to Joseph Parkinson, but is now known to have been written by Dickens himself. 

A major Dickensian discovery

Book dealer Dr. Jeremy Parrott has discovered a bound collection of All the Year Round with annotations that, according to leading scholars, are "almost certainly" by Dickens himself, identifying the authors of all the anonymous pieces that were published in the magazine. Among these writers are Elizabeth Gaskell, Lewis Carroll, and Wilkie Collins. Said BBC financial broadcaster Paul Lewis: "This is the Rosetta Stone of Victorian studies because it gives you the key to what hundreds of people wrote. When this list emerges it will change Victorian scholarship.”

Dickens and the Vow of the Peacock

Katy Waldman of Slate is fed up with New Year's resolutions. She turns to Dickens's account of the medieval "Vow of the Peacock" to find a worthy alternative.

A Dickens of a job

John Drew of Dickens Journals Online has a nice letter in the Guardian thanking those who helped to edit the online archives of Household Words and All the Year Round.

(From one who did a tiny bit of that work, Mr. Drew, you're very welcome!)

Because one can never have too much 'A Tale of Two Cities'

. . . there's a new readthrough about to start! This one has its own blog and is sponsored by the Victorian Studies Centre and Dickens Journals Online.

7 Quick Takes Friday

• If you're a U.K. resident, you could win a private tour of the Museum of London's Dickens and London exhibition. See the Guardian for details.
• Dickens Journals Online completed their project of putting all of Household Words and All the Year Round online. They're holding a launch conference at the end of March at the University of Buckingham, in conjunction with the University of Leicester.
• The site Dickens Daily is publishing all the novels serially online, one installment per day.
• PBS's Masterpiece has its Great Expectations page up.
• In a video interview with Access Hollywood, Holliday Grainger talks about filming the other Great Expectations (in which she plays Estella), and how much she enjoyed speaking her favorite line from the book.
• The Huffington Post has an interesting article about biblical references in Oliver Twist.
• Marlborough School in Falmouth came up with some fun ways of celebrating Dickens (and had to correct one child who thought Dickens invented the Muppets).

Charles Dickens, clairvoyant?

The Guardian has a weird tale of how Dickens published a ghost story remarkably similar to one that was about to be published in another magazine, without having seen it.