OUR DICKENS: DICKENS AND HIS PUBLICS
17th-19th July 2020, Bloomsbury, London

Charles Dickens by Samuel Laurence Copyright Charles Dickens Museum

In 2020, the 150-year anniversary of Dickens’s death, the annual Dickens Society Symposium will take place in Bloomsbury, Dickens’s home for periods of time and where he produced some of his most memorable novels. Organised by Royal Holloway, University of London, in collaboration with the Charles Dickens Museum (formerly the Dickens House Museum), the anniversary Symposium seeks to explore what Dickens means to so many people across the world and why he has meant so much to diverse publics over time. Proposals from scholars, independent researchers, and graduate students on the theme of ‘Our Dickens: Dickens and his Publics’ are invited; as is customary at Dickens Society symposia, proposals on other aspects of Dickens’s life and work will also be considered. One page (250-300 word) abstracts for papers deliverable in 20 minutes, plus 150-word bios, may be submitted Sept. 1 – Nov. 1, 2019 to Dickens.Symposium.2020@gmail.com

For more information, please visit dickenssociety.org or contact Program Committee Chair, Elizabeth Bridgham at bridgham@providence.edu

Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Dickens and Fame
• Dickens and Celebrity
• Adaptation
• Dickens as children’s literature
• Dickens’s cross-class appeal
• The Public Readings
• The use of Dickens in education
• The use of Dickens in conflict zones
• Dickens and literary tourism
• Dickens and the Heritage Industry
• Dickens and Journalism
• The political uses of Dickens
• Dickens in translation
• Imagined Community
• Fandom
• Dickensian ‘tat’
• Postmodern Dickens
• Memorials and/or commemoration
• Authors’s houses
• Place
• Dickens and the Visual
• Animated Dickens
• Neo-Victorian Dickens
• Intertextuality
• Myth-making
• Public history
• Nostalgia
• Commodification
• Personal memories

The Symposium will commence on Thursday 16^th July with a welcome drinks reception at the Dickens Museum. On Friday 17^th July, there will be a drinks reception in Royal Holloway’s Victorian Picture Gallery, which includes works by Millais, Frith, Landseer and others; the Victorian campus has more than once been voted the most beautiful in the world. On Saturday 18^th July, for the first time ever, the Dickens Society will join the Dickens Fellowship for a joint dinner at Goodenough College in Bloomsbury to commemorate the 150-year anniversary.