Author: Dickens Society Blog


Dickens at the Intersection of Literacy and Numeracy Anxieties


This post has been contributed by Brittany Carlson, PhD Candidate in the English Department of the University of California, Riverside. She can be found on Twitter @BrittanyAnneCa2 Writer’s block is all too common an experience. An idea is “on the tip of your tongue” one...

The Use of Dickens in Popular Fiction: ‘Spirited’ by Julie Cohen


By Deborah Siddoway The ‘making of fiction is an inseparable part of his being.’ So said Peter Ackroyd of Dickens in his 1990 biography of the inimitable author. [1] And as we now commemorate the life of Dickens in the 150th year since his death,...

Dickens Possibly Influenced “Sweeney Todd”


By Herb Moskovitz. Reprinted with kind permission of the author and David Perdue’s The Charles Dickens Page. In Philadelphia there is a wonderful walk-through exhibit of A Christmas Carol in Macy’s on Market Street. There are three-dimensional tableaus of scenes from the classic story and in the...

Call for Papers for the 26th Annual Dickens Society Symposium, “Dickens in Print.” July 11-14, 2021, Rochester, New York


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...

Call for Posts for the Dickens Society Blog


The Dickens Society Blog is under new editorship! Dr Katie Bell and Katie Holdway are looking for engaging submissions from scholars at all career stages on any aspect of Dickensian research. For the fall/winter term of 2020, we particularly welcome posts from researchers new to...

#Dickens150: The First Global Online Gathering for Dickens


This conference report has been contributed by Renata Goroshkova, St. Petersburg State University, Russia. Read her most recent posts here and here. June 9 will definitely go down in the history of Dickens studies since it marked the first online large-scale zoom conference. #Dickens150, organized...

A New Dickensian Venture


“I heard some voices, familiar in my ears I thought” Bleak House, ch. 37 The Dickens Society is excited to announce their latest venture in all things Dickensian, this one carefully curated for your ears, and thus for your walks, commutes, and relaxation. That’s right,...

Steve Weinshel on the Dickens Society YouTube Channel


Steve Weinshel is the maternal great-great-great grandson of Dr. Godfrey Howitt (1800-1873), the younger brother of author William Howitt (1792-1879). Weinshel shares events from the lives of his distant uncle and aunt, William and Mary Botham Howitt, who were Victorian writers, journalists, translators, and adventurers,...

COVID-19 Matching Program


“Mankind was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The deals of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”  Charles Dickens, “A Christmas Carol” So far, individuals have contributed a total of $3100...

Into the Dickens-Verse, pt. 2


This is the second part of Christian Lehmann’s analysis of how Into the Spider-Verse engages with Great Expectations. To read part one, click here. When we left off last time, we had set up a number of ways in which Great Expectations appears throughout Spider-Verse. In this installment,...