Blog – Page 12 – The Dickens Society

“It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view”: Adapting Middlemarch in the Information Age

In this post, Emily Bell (@EmilyJLB) interviews Rebecca Shoptaw (@rebecca_ish) about her web series of Middlemarch. The Dickens Project’s annual ‘Dickens Universe’ event will this year be focusing on Middlemarch instead of the usual Dickens novel, breaking with tradition for the first time in its...

Charles Dickens and Barnaby Rudge: The First Description of Williams Syndrome?

This post has been contributed by Darren Eblovi, MD, MPH and Christopher Clardy, MD. In 1961, J.C.P. Williams described four patients with common atypical facial features, heart defects, and intellectual disability. Williams syndrome, as this condition has since been named, is caused by a genetic...

“The Objectionable Dog”: Dog and Master as Metaphor in Little Dorrit

This post has been contributed by Clara Defilippis. Read her first post for the Dickens Society blog, ‘Gift-Giving in the Proper Dickens Spirit’, here. You can also read Molly Katz and Erin Horáková’s post about dogs in David Copperfield here. A flurry of short encounters...

Using the Whole Animal: Domestic Economy in The Charles Dickens Cookbook

This post has been contributed by Christian Dickinson. In 1980, Brenda Marshall brought out The Charles Dickens Cookbook, a text which features a brilliantly eclectic mix of dishes and recipes from the mid-Victorian Era, based on the writings of the Inimitable himself. In the...

“Take Care of Him. He Bites”: Dogs in David Copperfield

This post has been contributed by Molly Katz and Erin Horáková. David Copperfield’s idyllic childhood is marked by the absence of dogs. He is brought into the world by Dr. Chillip, “the meekest of his sex, the mildest of little men…he hadn’t a word to...

Dickens Society Blog: Call for Posts

The Dickens Society blog is aimed at disseminating Dickensian research both amongst the Society’s membership and to the larger academic community. We welcome ongoing submissions from researchers at any career level on any topic relating to Dickens’s life, work, or world – if you would...

Finding Bleak House in Martin Chuzzlewit

This post has been contributed by Matthew Redmond. As many of us know too well, The Modern Library prefaces every Dickens novel with a three-page headnote titled “Charles Dickens,” which strives to outline certain crucial moments of his life and career. Perhaps the biggest turning...

Dickens and Dog-Drama: the Walworth Dog meets the Uncommercial Traveller

This post has been contributed by Dr Ann Featherstone (University of Manchester). Dickens is well-known for his love of theatre, whether it was Christmas treats at Drury Lane or a bloody melodrama at the Victoria Theatre in the New Cut. But in the guise of...

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Dickens and the Underdog

This post has been contributed by Catherine Burgass, a Lecturer and Honorary Research Fellow at Staffordshire University with a specialism in local literary studies. She also teaches at Keele University Continuing Education. The use of animal metaphors for mechanical or human subjects is a common...

“I and my fellows are ministers of Fate”: Dickens and his beloved Ariel, Priscilla Horton

This post has been contributed by Katie Bell. Katie is a PhD student at the University of Leicester. Her thesis is titled “The Diaspora of Dickens: Death, Decay and Regeneration”, the focus of which is the intertextuality of Dickens’s works and 20th century American texts...