Dickensblog

The foggiest notion

The Dickens Museum has a new exhibition devoted to one of the most pervasive elements of Victorian London: fog. Items on display as part of "A Great and Dirty City: Dickens and the London Fog" include a first edition of Bleak House (with its famous opening description of "fog everywhere") and Dickens's own fire poker, in memory of the coal fires that did so much to produce the fog. The Spectator has an article about the exhibition here.

A visit to the gallery

A new piece at Open Culture highlights the work of Michael John Goodman, creator of the Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery, a collection of all the original illustrations from Dickens's major works.

Maureen Dowd on Dickens and Christmas

From today's New York Times: 

Christmas morally radicalized Dickens. The disparity between the circumstances and fates of different people offended Dickens in the Christmas season. For him, it was a time to think about what we owe one another, how we live with one another; a time to have a proper sense of outrage about inequality and injustice, and to think about the past, present and future and how much they have to do with each other; a time to consider the good values we’ve thrown away and the bad values — selfishness, egotism, social snobbery, condescension and the worship of money — that infiltrate the heart.

Go here to read the whole piece.

Dickens on British TV

Acclaimed actress Miriam Margolyes is not a fan of Christmas, but she is famously a fan of Dickens. So she "has agreed to see if she can warm to the season through her love of Charles Dickens," in a Channel 4 special called "Miriam's Dickensian Christmas." The special airs Tuesday night, and Margolyes talks about it here. Lucinda Dickens Hawksley also worked on the special, and she discusses it here.

In other British television news, Mark Gatiss's filmed stage production of A Christmas Carol, which was recently in cinemas, will air on BBC Four (and BBC iPlayer) on Christmas Day.

Benjamin Dreyer on 'the joy of reading Dickens'

In the Washington Post, Benjamin Dreyer of Random House pens a lovely and enthusiastic tribute to "A Christmas Carol" and its author. He glories in the story's "scrumptious quotableness," and he has fun imagining Dickens scrambling to get the story finished and trying to fix the time discrepancy ("Nice save, Charles"). Read the whole delightful piece here. (I've gifted the article so there's no paywall.) Thanks to Fred Butterfield for the tip!

Dickens the diva?

Eleven unpublished Dickens letters are on display at the Dickens Museum, and also available to view online (go here and type "archives and manuscripts" into the search engine). Among them is one in which he complains about Sunday postal service being discontinued in his village of Higham -- described by two different commentators, Pete Orford and Adela Suliman, as "diva" behavior. Was Dickens being a diva or justifiably frustrated? Read the letter and judge for yourself!

In Dickens's shadow

Writing in Crime Reads, novelist Simon Toyne graciously acknowledges his -- and every writer's -- debt to Dickens: "Just as the bones of Dickens’ London are still visible beneath the flesh of the modern city as you walk through Chancery, or down Fleet Street, or through Covent Garden, or any of the stone lined lanes of the old city, so the shadow of Dickens falls across the work of any writer who dares to tread where he once trod." Read more here.

Dickens and the supernatural

Smithsonian Magazine has an article on Dickens as a "fascinated skeptic" of supernatural phenomena. It's promoting the upcoming Dickens Museum exhibit To Be Read at Dusk: Dickens, Ghosts and the Supernatural, which will open in October.

Dickens the magician

You may know that Dickens was a skilled amateur magician, but do you know what some of his favorite magic tricks were? Literary Hub has the scoop!

Dickens in the 'New York Times'

Robert Fairhurst-Douglas's new book on Dickens, recently reviewed in The New Yorker, today was reviewed in the New York Times.