Dickensblog

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Eleven unpublished Dickens letters are on display at the Dickens Museum, and also available to view online (go here and type "archives and manuscripts" into the search engine).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!

Dickens code cracked!

Diligent decoders have finally solved the mystery of Dickens's "Tavistock letter," which turned out to be about ... advertising. Apologies to all who were hoping for something more exciting! BBC News has the story of how the code was cracked and who earned the reward for cracking it. 

A letter for sale

On December 15, Christie's will auction off a particularly "colorful" letter written by Dickens about a dinner gone wrong during one of his Christmas Carol reading tours. Click here for details!

Decode Dickens and win a prize!

The Dickens Code Project is offering £300 to whoever can decipher the "Tavistock letter," a letter Dickens wrote in his own "messy" personal version of shorthand. The Daily Mail has the details! Thanks to Rachel McMillan for the tip.

'Oliver Twist' in the news

Today we have a few different Oliver-related items of interest:

• The Daily Mail has some photos from the set of the new "Dodger" series, featuring Christopher Eccleston (Fagin) and Saira Choudhry (Nancy).
• The Guardian has a nice article about the Charles Dickens Museum's new Oliver Twist-themed walking tour.
• Finally, i news has an article about a couple of letters that the Museum is displaying in its new exhibit on Oliver Twist, which opened yesterday. The letters -- one written by Dickens himself, and one by his doctor -- show the toll that Dickens's public readings of the "Sikes and Nancy" episode took on his physical and emotional health.

The letter that wasn't?

British shopping channel Ideal World had to pull a Dickens letter they were offering for sale when Dr. Leon Litvack of The Charles Dickens Letters Project claimed it was a forgery. But the channel promises "further enquiries" to try to verify that the letter is genuine. Read more here.

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!)

The sad tale of the Dickens turkey

According to a recently rediscovered letter from the author, the 30-pound turkey Dickens was to have had for his last Christmas dinner met with a very unfortunate accident.

Finding Squeers

A letter from Dickens to Lord Robert Grosvenor, which will go up for auction next week, resurrects the debate over which schoolmaster Wackford Squeers was based on.

Charles Dickens and the decline of journalism

I don't often use this blog to comment on current affairs, but a recent news story about Dickens illustrates the problems with modern-day journalism so well, it's hard to pass up the opportunity to point it out.

A letter from Dickens to author Florence Marryat has recently been discovered and is going up for auction. In this letter, Dickens rejected a piece that she submitted to All the Year Round. Apparently she had asked him to provide an extensive critique of the piece, which he emphatically declined to do: "Surely that is scarcely reasonable. . . . You have no idea of the labor inseparable from the editing of such a Journal as All The Year Round, when you suppose it within the bounds of possibility that those who discharge such duties can give critical reasons for the rejection of papers."

Various papers, reporting on the finding of the letter, chose, as papers will too often do, to sensationalize it. The Telegraph headlined it "Unseen Charles Dickens letter reveals rude retort to fan"; the Independent, "Never-before-seen Charles Dickens letter reveals rude response to fan."

A few problems with this take on things: