Given our recent postponement of London 2020, this year’s proposal process will work a little differently. If you were accepted for the 2020 meeting and you wish to propose the same paper, please do so, and you will be accepted again. (Asking you to re-send your abstract helps us to track who wants to have their acceptance renewed.) If you wish instead to propose a new topic, or if you did not propose a paper last year, please send a new abstract so that we may consider your work. With this combination of previously- and newly-proposed papers, we will not organize strictly around a specific theme this year. But given Rochester’s rich history of engagement with printing, the printed image, and the history of the book (see below), the organizers especially encourage new papers that take up these subjects in relation to Dickens. Suitable topics include, but are not limited to:

• the printing, serialization, and volume-issue of Dickens’s works
• Dickens and his printers
• Dickens and print culture
• Dickens and the magazine
• illustrators, and illustrated editions of Dickens’s works
• Dickens and photography
• Dickens and penmanship or shorthand
• Dickens’s signatures, autographs, and signature flourish.

To have your work considered, please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words to Sean Grass at scggsl@rit.edu no later than December 15, 2020.

Rochester is a metropolitan area of a little more than 1 million people with a major airport, good public transportation, reliable Uber/Lyft/taxi services, cultural sites, and tourist attractions. Dickens gave two public readings in Rochester during his 1868 reading tour, performing on March 10 and March 16 at the Corinthian Hall, which was unfortunately destroyed by fire in 1898 then finally demolished in 1928. He was among several notable people to speak at the Corinthian Hall during the second half of the nineteenth century, including Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. During his 1842 visit to the United States, Dickens certainly passed near Rochester, too, though he does not record the city among his stopping places. The city boasts innumerable Victorian homes and several historic districts, and its metropolitan area extends northward to the shore of Lake Ontario.

The official host for the Symposium is the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), where current Society Vice President Sean Grass teaches and is making the local arrangements. Because Rochester was the original home of Kodak and Xerox, RIT’s Special Collections include a wealth of materials related to printing, the printed image, and the history of the book. The jewel of RIT’s Cary Collection is William Morris’s Kelmscott Press—which is in working order, and which we shall all get to play with during an evening reception at the Wallace Library. An afternoon/evening excursion, including the Dickens Dinner, will take place at the Genesee Country Village and Museum, the largest living history museum in the state of New York. (Because of the nature of the site, the Dickens Dinner will even include period-appropriate cookery!)

Though RIT is the host, the conference site will be the Strathallan Hotel & Spa, where we will hold an informal opening night reception on Sunday, July 11 before the panels begin (also at the Strathallan) the next morning. More details about the Strathallan are forthcoming, including room block and rates. Within a few blocks of the Strathallan you will be able to find eateries of many kinds and cultural sites such as the George Eastman House Museum, the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, and the Rochester Museum and Science Center, besides the quaint and quirky shops and cafes of Rochester’s “Neighborhood of the Arts.” At the cost of a 5-minute taxi ride, you can go from the Strathallan to High Falls, an impressive waterfall located in the city center. For those of you who want to make a longer trip of it, Rochester is only a little over an hour from Niagara Falls by car and approximately 90 minutes from the Finger Lakes area with its many wineries. Other attractions are also nearby, from breweries to amusement parks.

In the months ahead, more information about the 2021 Symposium will be added to the Dickens Society website, and we will build an appropriate page allowing for registration. We are also considering avenues by which we might make the conference virtual, in the event that meeting in person remains unsafe or unwise. Save the date, and we hope to see you in Rochester next year! If you have questions, please contact Sean Grass at scggsl@rit.edu.