Dickensblog

Keeping Christmas all the year

'Tis the season, as you know, when the world is rereading and rewatching A Christmas Carol. But the other day, inspired by a Twitter conversation about how Great Expectations is also a Christmas book (or at least part of it is), I went looking for Christmas references in other Dickens books as well. Interestingly, I found at least one reference in every single one of the novels! The majority of them were just passing references, but a few of them were significant. Besides Scrooge's Christmas ordeal, and the other Christmas books, we have ...

• The Christmas chapters in The Pickwick Papers, which include a goblin story that gives us a foretaste of the Carol
• David and Agnes getting engaged at Christmastime in David Copperfield
• Pip bringing Magwitch food, and later seeing him get arrested, on Christmas Day, in Great Expectations
• Edwin vanishing (and most likely murdered) on Christmas Eve in The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Occasionally, even a book that doesn't have a Christmas scene in it have film adaptations where Christmas scenes have been added! One well-known example is the 1935 A Tale of Two Cities, which places an important interaction between Sydney and Lucie on Christmas Eve. No doubt this was a nod to the Christmasy atmosphere that Dickens was known for. 

As Boze Herrington recently wrote of Dickens at All the (Dickensian) Year Round, "Christmas awoke something nameless and secret in him," something that makes it show up again and again in his stories as a pivotal time in people's lives. Watching for such incidences as we read him is one enjoyable way to "keep [Christmas] all the year," as Scrooge promises to do. And so, a merry Christmas to you all, not just today but always!

Upcoming online talks

Tomorrow, April 27, Dr. Emily Dunbar of the Dickens Museum will give a talk on the museum's new Pickwick Papers exhibition at 10 a.m. Eastern. Go here to learn more and get a free ticket!

Also tomorrow, at 1 p.m. Eastern, the Dickens Fellowship will sponsor Lucinda Dickens Hawksley talking about her new book, Dickens and Travel. Go here for information.

Starring Pickwick

The Dickens Museum is going Pickwickian! They have an upcoming exhibition on Pickwick illustrations and three upcoming performances of The Trial of Mr. Pickwick. And the Minute Book, which "contains the official club notes of the first known Pickwick club," will be going on display there next month. 

R.I.P., Leslie Bricusse

The award-winning composer co-wrote the score for the 1970 film Scrooge, later adapting it for the stage. He also wrote the lyrics for the 1963 stage musical Pickwick, based on Dickens's first novel. Leslie Bricusse passed away on Tuesday at age 90.

'Estella Scrooge' available online

The Streaming Musicals website has a new Christmas Carol musical. I haven't taken a look myself yet, but there are some impressive theatrical names involved, including John Caird (director of Les Miserables and Nicholas Nickleby); Paul Gordon (composer/lyricist of Jane Eyre and Daddy Long Legs), and Betsy Wolfe, whom I once saw give an inspired performance as Rosa Bud in The Mystery of Edwin Drood on Broadway. And when the synopsis says that Estella Scrooge meets up with Pip Nickleby at Harthouse in Pickwick, Ohio, you know someone knew their Dickens! Go here to find out how to buy or rent the show, and here for more information on the show itself.

Man of a thousand (Dickensian) faces

It's the time of year when news of various A Christmas Carol productions around the world floods my inbox. Most of them don't get a mention here because there are just too many, but every once in a while I spot one that I think merits a mention.

Such a one is the one-man version of the show at Los Angeles's Geffen Playhouse. Jefferson Mays is the actor portraying every character -- more than 50 -- in the story, and there are few actors more fitted to the task. Mays has made a specialty of this kind of show, playing more than 40 characters in I Am My Own Wife, and later playing nine roles in A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder (in which I was fortunate enough to see him). In short, as the Los Angeles Times puts it, he "is a performer who can unleash multitudes," and moreover, "is an ideal conduit for Dickens’ authorial voice . . . [who] relishes the sly observational humor as well as the horror." (Mays and his wife, Susan Lyons, also helped to adapt the story. In this interview he speaks of his history with A Christmas Carol, as well as his recently discovered love for The Pickwick Papers.)

Those of you who can make it to the Geffen during this run (which ends December 9) will most likely find it worth your while!  

A blogger's journey through Dickens

Elliott at Cultivations & Curiosities wanted to pick a writer and read his or her complete novels, from first to last, and to blog his way through them. For this project, he said, "I wanted a novelist whose company I enjoyed and whose works filled me with pleasure and amazement. When it came down to it, Charles Dickens was the obvious choice." Elliott has already started his journey; here's his introductory post, and his first two posts about The Pickwick Papers are here and here. I look forward to following his journey and thought some of you might like to as well! (And thanks to him for giving this blog a shoutout!)

R.I.P. Fenella Fielding

The British actress has passed away at the age of 90. She appeared in A Parish Boy's Progress, a 2008 Oliver Twist adaptation shot in Keighley with a cast of people with learning disabilities. She also appeared in the 1985 BBC version of The Pickwick Papers.

Pickwickians in Maine

The Lewiston-Auburn Sun Journal has a nice feature on The Pickwick Club, "Maine's only Charles Dickens reading and discussion club."

Merry Christmas!

A good Dickensian toast for the day, as suggested by Bustle: 

“Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth; that can transport the sailor and the traveller, thousands of miles away, back to his own fire-side and his quiet home!”