Interdisciplinary Dickens

“Confess this minute … that you did it to correct and amend me!”: Gaslighting in Dickens’s Novels

This post is contributed by Dr. Katherine J. Kim, assistant professor at Molloy University in New York. Katherine’s other recent projects have been book chapters and articles on Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, and Catherine Crowe. In the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year...

Connecting the Dots…

This post is contributed by our new blog co-editor, Michelle Crowther. Michelle is a Learning and Research Librarian at Canterbury Christ Church University in Kent and also a PhD candidate. She can be found on Twitter at @HumLib_cccu. My research is in writing groups and...

CFP: Write for The Dickens Society Blog!

The Dickens Society Blog is under new editorship! Dr Katie Bell and Michelle Crowther (not pictured in the illustration above) are looking for engaging submissions from scholars at all career stages on any aspect of Dickensian research. We particularly welcome posts from researchers new to...

Dispatches from the 26th Symposium: Charles Dickens and Peter Pitchlynn

Contributed by Spencer Dodd, PhD Student, Louisiana State University. Recent years have seen significant scholarly interest in Dickens and race, a trend continued by the 2021 Virtual Dickens Symposium, which featured multiple papers analyzing Dickens’s works in the context of racial issues. While these papers...

Nineteenth-century painting of a gentleman having his tooth pulled by a dentist. A dog barks in fright and two customers watch from the doorway

Dental Afterlives: Dickens and Victorian Dentistry

This post is contributed by Eleanor C. Faulkner, PhD student in the department of English and Drama at Queen Mary University, London. Our culture has inherited unsavoury dental practitioners. These include those pilloried by Charlie Chaplin’s silent film ‘Laughing Gas’ (1914), the films Marathon Man...

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,...

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...

Opium, Muffins, and Tea: The Setting of Nicholas Nickleby

This post has been contributed by Dano Cammarota. As a rule, and often unconsciously, I approach literature from a historical perspective. It is my comfort zone and understandably the works of Charles Dickens provide a plethora of history woven seamlessly into the narrative. At the...

CULTIVATING THE FUTURE OF DICKENS SCHOLARSHIP

THE 24TH ANNUAL DICKENS SOCIETY SYMPOSIUM STUDENT WORKSHOPS This post has been contributed by Katherine J. Kim (Assistant Professor of English, Molloy College). From July 26th-29th, 2019, the 24th Annual Dickens Society Symposium was held in beautiful Salt Lake City, Utah at the Hotel Monaco. During...