Dickensblog

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."

A.N. Wilson's thoughts on Dickens, and my thoughts on A.N. Wilson

British author A.N. Wilson has just released a new biography, The Mystery of Charles Dickens, in the U.K. You can find reviews of his book here, here, and here.

I don't know whether I'll read Wilson's book or not when it gets published over here, but I can say this much: If I do, I'll take it with a large grain of salt. Here's why:

Dickens in living color

The Dickens Museum has had eight photographs of the author colorized. Go here to see the first one and to learn more about the process and the results!

'Our Mutual Friend' chosen as 'Guardian's' reading group book

Go here for the details of the June readalong!

'The Guardian's' June Dickens club: Cast your vote!

Sam Jordison of The Guardian will be leading a Dickens readalong in June, and he's asking for readers to vote on which book! Head over there (you should be able to register for an online account for free) and tell him which book you want in the comments section. There's already a very lively discussion (five pages' worth!) going on there, and by my rough estimate, Our Mutual Friend is in the lead so far. 

I'm not certain when the voting closes, so if you want to participate, hurry and get yours in!

It's about 'time'

At Book Riot, Kathleen Keenan does a deep dive into the famous "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" line -- doing us all a great favor, as there's a regrettable tendency for modern writers to quote the line without thinking about its meaning. And boy, does it have meaning. As Keenan says, 

Looking back on a turbulent era of history, Dickens is aware that we all tend to claim our current era is the most difficult, the most unsettled, the most interesting. But, this sentence points out, his contemporary Victorian readers aren’t the first to think that way. Why, not so long ago, in the 1780s, look at how people thought of the times they lived in, this sentence seems to suggest. This is one way Dickens uses to create a parallel between his readers and these figures of the past. At the end of this very long sentence, he even says it explicitly: “the period was so far like the present period” in this regard.

That’s one reason why this line holds up so well: every new generation thinks their struggles are uniquely difficult. 

Go here to read more.

Visit the Dickens Museum online

The Charles Dickens Museum is now displaying images of many of its items online -- a project that began before the shutdown but turned out to be very "timely," according to curator Louisa Price. (A classic Dickensian coincidence, or Dickensidence, as we sometimes call them around here!) Go take a look, and while you're there, remember that the Museum could really use some donations right now, if you can spare anything!

Purse dogs are out, purse letters are in

If you'd told me that the next Dickens scandal would involve designer handbags containing small pieces of a letter he wrote . . . I'd probably have doubted you.

And yet, here we are.

(Just in case you should want one of these, all you have to do is scrape together 2,750 Euros!)