Dickensblog

Happy 210th birthday, Charles Dickens!

All hail the Inimitable on this happy occasion! 

In honor of Dickens's birthday, the Dickens Museum is kicking off a writing competition. The writer of the winning short story or novel excerpt will receive this beautiful facsimile of the Oliver Twist manuscript. Click here to see all the details, and then put those quill pens to paper (or fingers to keys, if you prefer). It's not that easy to follow in Dickens's footsteps, but one can at least give it a try!

(Image made by yours truly!)

New year, new reading

Happy New Year! Jeremy Parrott of Dickens & Co., who's a Dickensblog reader and a member of our Facebook group, is starting 2022 right by beginning a new project, "Reading David Copperfield in Parts." Jeremy will be leading the readings on his YouTube channel, as he explains in this introduction to the project. He'll also be giving away a first edition of Bleak House, so you'll want to pay attention to find out how you can win!

The first video is below, and here's the link where you can subscribe to make sure you don't miss any upcoming ones.

 

Fireside reading and a character competition

Those book reviews are coming, I swear, but first a couple of quick news items:

• Actor and audiobook narrator Gildart Jackson will begin reading from Great Expectations at 8 Eastern this evening at @firesidereading on Instagram. He plans to read a chapter a day.
• The Journalists' Charity, co-founded by Dickens, is honoring the 150th anniversary of his death by asking for "written portraits of a modern-day Dickens character." The Guardian has more.  

And the winner is . . .

The drawing has been held, and Art K. is the winner of The Daily Charles Dickens! Congratulations, Art! I'll e-mail you to get your address. Thanks to all of you who participated; I really enjoyed reading your chosen quotes.

Giveaway: 'The Daily Charles Dickens'

Hello, everyone! I'm afraid I've been sadly neglecting this blog in recent weeks. I was busy finishing a book manuscript, which was a real time-sucker for a while. (It's not a book about Dickens, but it does mention him a couple of times!)

So I've gotten far behind and have a lot of catching up to do here. But to thank you all for your patience, I'm kicking off this blog resurgence with a giveaway of the new book The Daily Charles Dickens: A Year of Quotes (The University of Chicago Press, edited by James Kincaid). It's a very interesting little book of daily Dickens quotes, some of which are what you'd expect but others of which are quite surprising. As Kincaid explains in his introduction, his goal was to highlight Dickens's "open-ended play with language and its possibilities." 

If you would like to enter the giveaway, all you have to do is to leave in the comments section one Dickens quotation that you would include if you were compiling a book of daily Dickens quotes. A week from today (November 5), I'll draw one name from all the commenters, and inform the winner. Good luck!

Lego my Dickens!

Portsmouth Historic Dockyard has commissioned five custom-designed Dickensian Lego figures -- of Dickens himself and four of his characters -- and you could win one! Go here to find out how!

If you'd like to buy the Dickens figure, he's available for sale at the designer's Etsy shop. Why he appears to be carrying a copy of the Gettysburg Address, I could not tell you, unless that was the only Lego piece available that looked like a manuscript. But he's pretty cute regardless.

A 'Christmas Carol' giveaway

For U.K. readers, W.W. Norton & Company and the Dickens Museum have five copies of the Original Manuscript Edition of A Christmas Carol to give away. Go here to find out how to enter the drawing! 

Dickens quiz at The Mirror

Give it a try! I got 24 out of 25. It's not the best quiz ever -- at least one of the questions is based purely on speculation, not fact -- but it's a fun one.

Dickens's report card

How might young Charles Dickens's teachers have described him? In a prizewinning entry for a contest held by the Spectator, Katie Mallett speculates on this topic. Read her entry and see if you agree!

'The Dickens and Darwin Conspiracy' trailer now available

A trailer has been released for the special new mission from Assassin's Creed Syndicate, featuring Charles Dickens and Charles Darwin. IGN has the trailer and more information here!