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The Dickens Fellowship, founded in 1902, is a worldwide association of people who share an interest in the life and works of Charles Dickens (1812 - 1870).
Royal party and read-a-thon mark big day for Dickens
Queen Elizabeth is throwing a star-studded party for him at Buckingham Palace and in Buenos Aires, leading cultural figures will gather in an old orphanage to read from his works.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, attending one of Dickens’s readings in Boston, “laughed as if he must crumble to pieces,” but, discussing Dickens afterward, he said, “I am afraid he has too much talent for his genius; it is a fearful locomotive to which he is bound and can never be free from it nor set to rest…He daunts me! I have not the key.”
Travelling in Italy in 1853, Charles Dickens wrote to Georgina Hogarth – sister of his soon-to-be estranged wife Catherine, and herself the writer’s stalwart housekeeper and executor – about his efforts to order a local bubbly. Dickens, who called himself “The Inimitable”, tries to find the right word in Italian for “un vino come champagne”. The waiter helps him out: “spumante”. “Inimitable: ‘Ecco la parola. L’ho trovato!’” He had indeed found the right word. The “Sparkler of Albion” almost never ceased to fizz. Edited with unobtrusive intelligence and insight by Jenny Hartley, this bicentenary selection of his letters both celebrates his unstoppered effervescence – and lets the reader count its cost, both for the Sparkler and his loved ones.
As the 200th anniversary of the birth of author Charles Dickens approaches, events are being held around the world to mark the occasion.
Dickens’ work has long been a worldwide industry and from California to the Netherlands events are being held to celebrate the writings of the Victorian author, who spent much of his career in Kent.
Charles Dickens’ bicentenary is on 7 February.
In the darkness, a figure wanders aimlessly, his head full of thoughts. He can’t sleep, so he rises from his bed and treads the gloomy streets of 19th century London. The man is Charles Dickens. As he walks, perhaps he uses the time to think up characters for his hugely successful books.
In death, Charles Dickens still keeps his greatest secret to himself — the essence of his energy. None of the physical relics he left behind betray it. The manuscripts of his novels — like “Our Mutual Friend” at the Morgan Library — look no more fevered or hectic than the manuscripts left behind by other novelists.
Charles Dickens with his two daughters, 1869.
… as we near his bicentenary, we should remember that this was a man tortured by the memory of poverty as a child, thin-skinned, cruel to his wife, dismissive of his children, a slave to overwork and, ultimately, victim of an early death, worn out not least in the effort to support himself, his estranged wife, and his mistress and her family.
His is a very Victorian story of social mobility, sexual hypocrisy, and tortured genius.
Radical, romantic, mythmaker – as his bicentenary nears, Charles Dickens still presents many faces to biographers
In the New Year [actress] Miriam Margolyes begins a world tour in which she will be reading Dickens’s work and discussing his perplexing personality, yet she remains an admirer.
“There is a problem with Dickens, as there is with all geniuses whose lives seem to betray the gifts they own. We want a good writer to be a good man,” she says.
How much does a cultural connection – with Austen, Elgar or Dickens – add to the value of a home?
