Dickensblog

Hard times for the 'Little Dorrit' church

The Church of St. George the Martyr in Bermondsey -- the model for the church in which Amy Dorrit was baptized, spent a night when locked out of the Marshalsea, and was married -- is in such poor shape that it has been declared "at risk" by the group Historic England.

Dickens, Harry Potter, and YA

Happy 20th anniversary to Harry Potter! We always knew the boy wizard had some Dickens connections. Here's another possible one: Young Adult fiction expert Krysti Meyer suggests that "if books like a lot of Charles Dickens’ works, or Jane Austen’s, or 'The Catcher in the Rye' or 'To Kill a Mockingbird' had been written today, they’d be labeled as YA, and I think a lot of people would skip over that experience of reading them just because they’d have that YA label on them."

Do you agree? Why or why not?

We're number . . . 2?

A British poll has named Charles Dickens the second greatest storyteller of all time . . . after Roald Dahl.

I am not happy.

It's not the second place that bothers me. Second greatest of all time is not bad. And if Dickens had been second to, say, Shakespeare, I would have accepted it gracefully. But I don't like Dahl. I know, I know, everyone likes Dahl. But I don't. Yes, he was talented and creative, but I sense a sour, sadistic streak in him that puts me right off -- unlike our warmhearted, life-affirming, endlessly enthusiastic Inimitable. 

Still, this is a poll where Stephenie Meyer shows up and Jane Austen doesn't, so we shouldn't take it seriously anyway.

Stalking Dickens

Simon Whistler at YouTube's Today I Found Out channel has a new video on "Charles Dickens and His Stalker," an interesting anecdote about Dickens's second trip to America that I had never heard before. Thanks to Lee for the tip!

A Dickensian Valentine's thought

Happy Valentine's Day, fellow Dickensians! Bas Bleu Bookseller's blog, The Bluestocking Salon, has included a Dickens quote on their list of "Literary Words of Love," and it's a good one. Go here to see which one they picked!

For services to humanity

Heartfelt thanks to Colin Dickey, whose essay in The New Republic (excerpted from the book Scratch, edited by Manjula Martin) debunks the egregious Dickens-was-paid-by-the-word myth -- which needs to be as debunked as often and as loudly as possible, considering how pervasive it is. Not only that, but Dickey shows one major reason why it's so egregious: "Once I’d formed this picture of Dickens in my mind, it became an easy way to discount his novels as superfluous."

Definitely worthy of the Dickensblog Order of Merit!

Recent Dickens sightings

A few mentions of Dickens in recent or upcoming novels:

• According to The Washington Post, Dickens's efforts with Urania Cottage, the home for former prostitutes, are mentioned in Charles Finch's latest detective novel, The Inheritance.
• In Elan Mastai's sci-fi novel All Our Wrong Todays, due out next month, Great Expectations is mentioned several times.
• Reader John Kyriacou reports that Dickens is a minor (but appealing!) character in British children's book The Girl Who Saved Christmas, by Matt Haig. 

Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and 'the contact of their imaginations'

As you may know, today marked the bicentennial of Charlotte Brontë’s birth. In the new biography Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart by Claire Harman, I found this passage about Brontë and Dickens:

A couple of lists

Joseph Luzzi, author of the new book In a Dark Wood, offers five recommended reads, one of which is A Tale of Two Cities: ". . . We are in Dickens Land, where story and imagination reign supreme, and where we are led onward by the most large-hearted of guides."

And here's a list from 2014 that I missed at the time: Kathryn Schulz's list of "The 5 Best Punctuation Marks in Literature." Number 4 is the colon in the first sentence of A Christmas Carol: ". . . This sentence is insane, or anyway destined to foment insanity in the grammatically prissy. It has death, a dangling participle, and a wonderfully garrulous narrator with some kind of unmentionable Victorian-era disease: wandering colon. It is great."

Charles Dickens attacked by vampires!

. . . Well, only figuratively. (But it makes a good post title, doesn't it?) I'm referring to an article by Frances Wilson in the New Statesman about "vampiric writers" -- a vampiric writer being one who "one who sinks his, or her, fangs into the flesh of another writer, and in so doing gives him or her a second life as a fictional figure." Wilson argues that Stephen Jarvis does this to Charles Dickens in his novel Death and Mr. Pickwick, accusing Jarvis of both "demonising" and "dehumanising" Dickens.

Well, I've sent for a review copy of Jarvis's novel, so we shall see . . .