Author: Dickens Society Blog


Dickens Society Blog: Call for Posts


“There are some places here,—oh Heaven how fine! I wish you could see the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio as it lies before me at this moment, on the opposite bank of the Arno! But I will tell you more about it, and about all...

Enthralling Expectations: The Dark Dreamscape of Satis House


Contributed by Anne Nagel, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln doctoral student researching the affective intensity of sleep and dreams in nineteenth-century British literature. I challenge you to find a Dickens novel that fails to employ multiple dreams, an intense dreamlike state, or at the very least,...

Dickens Re-Focused: Hebden Bridge Artists Suggest New Ways to Interpret Classics


  In this post, Catherine Quirk (@quirk_catherine) interviews Melinda Joy Chantler and Clare Lupino of Arcanum in Hebden Bridge about their collaborative Treated Books project. In their most recent work, they interpret Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1) by collaboratively drawing into the pages....

“He may just go to the Devil”: The Stormy Collaboration of Dickens and Cruikshank


This post has been contributed by Laurena Tsudama. In a letter to his publisher John Macrone on October 19, 1836, the young author Charles Dickens wrote: “I have long believed Cruikshank to be mad; and his letter therefore, surprises me, not a jot. If you...

Dickens Day 2017


This post has been contributed by Beatrice Ashton-Lelliott, a PhD researcher studying magicians, both fictional and real, and conjuring in the nineteenth century. Find her on Twitter @beeashlell. Saturday 14th October saw a full house gather for the annual Dickens Day conference at Senate House...

Oliver! Captivate Theatre


This post has been contributed by Erin Horáková. Read her previous posts here and here. “Oliver, never before has a boy—“ no, sorry. I have come to review Captivate Theatre’s Edinburgh Fringe production of Oliver! at the Rose Theatre, not to launch into the big...

Dickens for Dinner


This post has been contributed by Erin Horáková. Read her previous post on dogs in David Copperfield, co-written with Molly Katz, here. Shakespeare for Breakfast is a venerable Edinburgh Fringe Festival institution that has been selling out its house for twenty-six seasons and is still...

Interdisciplinary Dickens, 14-16 July 2017


The following post by Chris Dickinson and Laurena Tsudama provides a summary of the 2017 Dickens Society symposium, Interdisciplinary Dickens. Submit your abstract for our 2018 symposium, Dickens and Language, taking place 30 July to 1 August 2018 in Tübingen, here. The 22nd annual Dickens Society...

The Dickensian George Eliot


This post has been contributed by Catherine Quirk. For anyone working in academia as a professor, as a graduate student, or as an unaffiliated researcher, “summer” tends to be a time not of holiday and relaxation but of research and conference travel (recent claims to...

Boz Reinvented: the Many Modern Faces of Charles Dickens


This post has been contributed by Katie Bell, in response to the 22nd annual Dickens Society Symposium, held in Boston, 14-16 July 2017. Read the storify from the conference here: Day One, Day Two, and Day Three. Read her first post for the Dickens Society...