Dickensblog

Birthday roundup

Just catching up on a few Dickens birthday articles from yesterday: 

• The BBC's HistoryExtra website shared a few quirky facts about Dickens's home life, including his love for parties and his taxidermied pets!
• Newsweek offered a few basic Dickens facts and popular quotes in honor of the day.
• Female First compiled a list of actors who have played Dickens. I knew about Simon Callow, Dan Stevens, and Ralph Fiennes, but not the others. (I certainly didn't know about Anthony Hopkins!)
• And finally, Londonist had an article about the pubs that every Dickensian should know.

Birthday festivities

Dickens's birthday is coming up, and the Dickens Birthplace Museum in Portsmouth will offer free admission to celebrate! Go here to learn more. In the meantime, Dickens fans in Philadelphia held their annual birthday bash by the Dickens statue in Clark Park. Philly Voice offers a glimpse into their hallowed tradition.  

Dickens in America

Still playing a little bit of catch-up here! This thoughtful and comprehensive article from City Journal's Autumn 2018 issue deals with Dickens's complicated relationship with the United States. A sample:

To Dickens and British radicals, the United States was a land of hope and freedom—freedom especially from the dominance of class. In a celebrated Boston speech, Dickens confided to his audience that he had “dreamed by day and night for years, of setting foot upon this shore, breathing this pure air.” But after visiting the “prisons, the police offices, the watch-houses, the hospital, the workhouse,” he began harboring doubts about the prospects for the American experiment. . . .

The “Emperor of Cheerfulness,” as Boston publisher James T. Fields called Dickens, became thoroughly disillusioned after he saw other city institutions for the broken, the criminal, and the mad. 

BBC Dickens miniseries news

My friends, I've failed you badly. I promised you book reviews, and then I left you dangling. For that I sincerely apologize. I have so many books that are due (overdue, really) for reviews, I couldn't seem to get all the reviews written! I haven't given up on that project, but today I have something else to share: news of the upcoming series of BBC Dickens adaptations.

Steven Knight, who will co-produce these with Tom Hardy, has told Collider that their Christmas Carol script is "largely done," that Hardy will star (whether as Scrooge or another character is not known), and that they're aiming for Christmas 2019. He also had some general thoughts on the other adaptations they plan to do. Like most adapters these days, he speaks of wanting to make them "modern" and gritty and so forth; as with most adapters, we'll have to wait and see exactly how these particular projects end up interpreting those terms.

We've been having a good discussion of the news in the Dickensblog Facebook group (thanks to Art for getting that started). Which reminds me, if you're a fan of this blog and you're on Facebook, please come join us there! 

Merry Christmas!

"Christmas has become the most industrialized bacchanalia of the year, in which the gluttony is amped up now by the ease with which once exotic goodies are commonplace on the gourmet websites. . . . Much of the blame for initiating this is often given to Charles Dickens, mostly on the basis of one voluptuous paragraph from his magical moral fable A Christmas Carol. . . . 

"However, blaming Dickens is misleading and unfair to him.

"Dickens had not set out to write a blurb for gluttony. His idea was driven by a Christian impulse to awaken his readers to the vast social inequities of his time. Walking at night through some of London’s poorest neighborhoods he said he had composed the story in his head “weeping and laughing and weeping again” at sights of grinding poverty and stubborn spirits. The spirits he embodied in the family of the clerk Bob Cratchit and the uncaring greed in Cratchit’s employer, Ebenezer Scrooge. . . .

Dickens’s narrative genius was underpinned by an instinctive empathy for his subjects. A Christmas Carol was the most sentimental of his works. The dark actor, Scrooge, repents as few greedy men in the real world ever do. A few years on, as Dickens found success and wealth, he embraced the story’s final celebratory flourish and began his own family’s Christmas feasts with the toast right out of the mouth of Tiny Tim, Cratchit’s lame son: 'God bless us every one!'"

That's from an article by Clive Irving in The Daily Beast. I recommend reading the whole thing -- it's rather rambly but very good. I had hoped to write something for you myself on the recent spate of Dickens-related Christmas-themed cookbooks, but in truth, I just haven't had the time to do it. (Also, I'm not exactly Martha Stewart, so anything I wrote about cookbooks wouldn't be all that trustworthy.) I am on vacation the rest of the week, though, and I plan to take some time and write some Dickens-related (but non-cooking-related) book reviews for you all, so I hope that will be enjoyable. And I hope you've had a merry Christmas.

Dickens in America

The Weekly Standard has a short piece on Dickens's first visit to America and the disillusionment it brought. Writer Danny Heitman does a nice job of showing of how both Dickens's cynicism and his romanticism came into play.

That time Dickens discussed religion with Mary Hogarth's spirit

Aleteia tells the story of a strange dream Dickens had during his time in Italy.

A Dickensian top ten

The Independent offers a "top ten" ranking of Dickens's novels. See what you think of their choices. There are some expected ones, but also some surprises!

A 'Great Expectations' Christmas

In the midst of all the Christmas Carol commemorations, a writer and an artist have given Great Expectations a turn in the spotlight. In a thoughtful piece at The Boston Globe, Joan Wickersham observes that, though Pip's Christmas in the early part of the book is  darker than Scrooge's, it may have something important of its own to communicate to us. And at The New York Times, Edward Carey has done a marvelously eerie drawing capturing some of the main characters, relationships, and settings of the book.

Celebrating 'A Christmas Carol'

In honor of the book's upcoming 175th anniversary, The New York Times has a lovely illustrated timeline about its history of covering the book over the years. And The Weekly Standard has a reflection -- inspired by the Muppet version, interestingly! -- on some of the deeper and darker themes in the story.