Dickensblog

New editions of interest

Oxford University Press is releasing Dickens's works in a new scholarly edition. Sketches by Boz is already out; Nicholas Nickleby and The Uncommercial Traveller are coming later this year. They're billed as "the first complete authoritative edition of his works" and promise "comprehensive annotation." (Which perhaps explains the prices!)

Meanwhile, for those of us who just enjoy pretty covers, Chiltern Classics recently added Oliver Twist and Hard Times to their Dickens inventory.

Coined by Dickens -- confirmed

Special thanks to the Dickensblog reader who checked on "twigsome" and found confirmation that Dickens did indeed coin it!

Coined by Dickens

". . . And when the twigsome trees by the wayside (which, I suppose, never will grow leafy, for they never did) guarded here and there a dusty soldier . . ."

I'm reading The Uncommercial Traveller in the new Oxford University Press edition, and was delighted to come upon this passage on page 62. I get sick of bare branches in the winter, but now I won't mind them so much, because I have a wonderful new word to describe them. I don't know for sure that Dickens coined "twigsome," but I don't remember ever seeing it anywhere else (and my spelling & grammar function doesn't recognize it, not that that means much), so I'm going to guess that he did.

(I also got a good laugh out of this on the same page: "The revolving French light on Cape Grinez was seen regularly bursting out and becoming obscured, as if the head of a gigantic light-keeper in an anxious state of mind were interposed every half-minute, to look how it was burning.")

Rare Dickens program on DVD

Creative Arts Television has made avaliable a DVD of the 1958 television special "London by Dickens," starring Alan Bates, which draws from many of Dickens's lesser-known writings. Thanks to Patrick McCarthy of the Dickens Forum for the tip!

(In case you're wondering, as I was, The Pic-Nic Papers mentioned in the description is not a typo. There really was such a work.)

The Inimitable is inexhaustible

So says biographer Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in this interview about the upcoming adaptations.

Recreating Dickens's London

The Uncommercial Traveler has been turned into "an immersive theatre experience" in East London. Click here and here for details.

But why is the rum gone?

The Crispin and Crispianus pub, which Mr. Dickens used to visit and which he wrote about in The Uncommercial Traveller, has been damaged by a "massive fire." Details are here and here.