Dickens’ London


Dickens isn’t dead. At least, not to begin with. Thoughts on Zadie Smith’s “The Fraud”; A Book Review 


This review is contributed by Mads Golding, a playwright, writer, and independent scholar who focuses on Charles Dickens and the long 19th century. She is a staff writer for The Dickens Society. Zadie Smith’s “The Fraud” can be purchased at The Seminary Co-op, Barnes and...

Miniature Curiosities, Mighty Considerations


This post is contributed by Anya Eastman, a third-year, Technē funded PhD student at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her thesis explores the posthumous representation of Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Oscar Wilde, with a focus on the relationship between texts and heritage sites. Anya...

Deep Impressions: Dickens’s Encounters with Houselessness


This post has been contributed by Dr. Trish Bredar, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on representations of physical mobility in British literature of the long nineteenth century, with particular interests in gender, walking,...

Curating Beyond COVID at the Charles Dickens Museum


This post has been contributed by Dr. Katherine Kim, assistant professor at Molloy University in New York. Katherine’s other recent projects have been book chapters and articles on Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, and Joseph Sheridan LeFanu’s “Schalken the Painter,” and “Bluebeard.” Her article...

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...

“The Hero of My Own Life”: David Copperfield and Carlyle’s “Hero as the Man of Letters”


Contributed by Marian Gentile (Temple University, Philadelphia) In the opening line of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), David states, “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show”...

Royal Doulton Dickens at The American Toby Jug Museum: Imitations of the Inimitable


Contributed by Lydia Craig, Loyola University Chicago Ever since the invention of Toby Jugs in the 1760s in Northern England, these collectibles have been bought and sold by people fascinated by the range of their creative potential. Technically, “A Toby Jug is a figural ceramic...

The Magic of Dickens’s Southwark


This post has been contributed by Amanda Harvey Purse. When we think of ‘Dickens’s London’, we may not instantly think of the borough of Southwark. This district however, packed a powerful punch for him, so much so that it played a vital role in Charles’s...

Call for Papers: The 25th Annual Dickens Society Symposium


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