![My life. No, I’m serious. That’s how I came to blog exclusively about Dickens!
fyeahenglishmajorarmadillo:
Picture: Background — a six piece pie style colour split, alternating black and grey. Foreground — a picture of an armadillo. Top text: “Tipsy at a party ” Bottom text: “Let me tell you about Dickens and his role prison reform”]
History major with a passion for Victorian literature here. I spent 3 months working on my research paper on Charles Dickens’s works and his role in prison reform in Victorian England for History Seminar. Six novels and a number of letters and literary critiques were read and analyzed to compose this paper. Ah the joys of combining literature and history. <3
Sidenote: I have yet to see any Dickens appreciation here :(
Submitted by: bonjourchaton](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4edfpGl3r1qhe5udo1_400.jpg)
My life. No, I’m serious. That’s how I came to blog exclusively about Dickens!
Picture: Background — a six piece pie style colour split, alternating black and grey. Foreground — a picture of an armadillo. Top text: “Tipsy at a party ” Bottom text: “Let me tell you about Dickens and his role prison reform”]
History major with a passion for Victorian literature here. I spent 3 months working on my research paper on Charles Dickens’s works and his role in prison reform in Victorian England for History Seminar. Six novels and a number of letters and literary critiques were read and analyzed to compose this paper. Ah the joys of combining literature and history. <3
Sidenote: I have yet to see any Dickens appreciation here :(Submitted by: bonjourchaton
Peggy Hill: Today we’ll be discusing A Tale of Two Cities, a terrific book by that most Dickensian of authors, Charles Dickens. Okay, you’ve all read it — c’mon, let’s get a dialogue going.
Student 1: Um, I really liked the guillotine.
Peggy Hill: Yes, yes.
Student 1: Um, why don’t they have a guillotine here?
Peggy Hill: I don’t know. But the thing is —
Student 2: Did anyone ever try and pull their head outta the guillotine at the last minute, so like just the top of their head got chopped off?
Peggy Hill: Okay, are there any questions not involving the guillotine?
[silence]
So that’s it? What about class differences? What about romantic love? Sacrifice and regret? Everything in life is between the covers of this book, people!
[rips up book]
Student 1: You went crazy.
* * *
Peggy Hill: I am looking to replace my well-worn and fully understood copy of A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles —
Shopkeeper: Dickens?
I officially have the best job ever. I work at a library, and get to peek at the new books before they go out on the shelves. Everyone knows what a Dickens fangirl I am, too, so they set aside any related books for me. With the bicentennial, I’ve gotten to read 5 or 6 new books already.
Just got this one today — looks pretty interesting!
Charles Dickens’s Networks: Public Transport and the Novel by Jonathan H. Grossman
The same week in February 1836 that Charles Dickens was hired to write his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, the first railway line in London opened. Charles Dickens’s Networks explores the rise of the global, high-speed passenger transport network in the nineteenth century and the indelible impact it made on Dickens’s work. The advent first of stage coaches, then of railways and transoceanic steam ships made unprecedented round-trip journeys across once seemingly far distances seem ordinary and systematic. Time itself was changed. The Victorians overran the separate, local times kept in each town, establishing instead the synchronized, ‘standard’ time, which now ticks on our clocks. Jonathan Grossman examines the history of public transport’s systematic networking of people and how this revolutionized perceptions of time, space, and community, and how the art form of the novel played a special role in synthesizing and understanding it all. Focusing on a trio of road novels by Charles Dickens, he looks first at a key historical moment in the networked community’s coming together, then at a subsequent recognition of its tragic limits, and, finally, at the construction of a revised view that expressed the precarious, limited omniscient perspective by which passengers came to imagine their journeying in the network.
"I have written and spoken elsewhere about my debt to the oral narrative traditions of India, and also to those great Indian novelists Jane Austen and Charles Dickens—Austen for her portraits of brilliant women caged by the social convention of their time, women whose Indian counterparts I knew well; Dickens for his great, rotting, Bombay-like city, and his ability to root his larger-than-life characters and surrealist imagery in a sharply observed, almost hyperrealistic background, out of which the comic and fantastic elements of his work seem to grow organically, becoming intensifications of, and not escapes from, the real world."
— Introduction to Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Apologies for the lack of posts lately…
I’m swamped with final papers and such at the moment, as the last few quotes I’ve posted might suggest… But I’ll be back to working on the blog soon enough!
And in the meantime, please feel free to submit something!
"Please, sir, he’s weeding the garden,” replied a small voice. “To be sure,” said Squeers, by no means disconcerted. “So he is. B-o-t, bot, t-i-n, tin, bottin, n-e-y, ney, bottinney, noun substantive, a knowledge of plants. When he has learned that bottinney means a knowledge of plants, he goes and knows ‘em. That’s our system,Nickleby; what do you think of it?"
— Nicholas Nickleby, chap. VIII
"The school is not quite deserted,” said the Ghost. “A solitary child, neglected by his friends, is left there still."
— A Christmas Carol, Stave II
"Herein lay the spring of the mechanical art and mystery of educating the reason without stooping to the cultivation of the sentiments and affections. Never wonder. By means of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, settle everything somehow and never wonder."
— Hard Times, chap. VIII
Great Expectations: Why Dickens is Still Relevant
The stars of Great Expectations discuss why the work of Charles Dickens still matters.
Every night he [Dickens] walked a dozen miles, without which, he said, ‘I should just explode and perish.’ Under the pseudonym Boz, Dickens wrote, ‘There is nothing we enjoy more than a little amateur vagrancy, walking through London as though ‘the whole were an unknown region to our wandering mind.’”
