• A production of A Christmas Carol in Great Massingham, Norfolk County, England, raised £2,791 for East Anglia Children's Hospices. A Dickensblog Order of Merit to them for their hard work and kindness!
  • A fifth-grade class in Garden City, New York, made their own movie based on A Christmas Carol.
  • Linda Grant calls Bleak House a "book of a lifetime." Not a bad article, though I think she's a little off the mark in her remark about religion.
  • Actor Lloyd Lee will play Dickens and several of his characters in the one-man show Educating Charlie — Mr. Dickens Looks Back this April on the Isle of Wight.
  • The Burlington (Vt.) Free Press has some interviews with the cast of a local production of Oliver! This is the first production of the show I've heard of where a girl has played the title character.
  • "When theatre director Edward Lam was invited to create a piece for Hong Kong at the recent World Expo 2010 in Shanghai, a Charles Dickens novel popped up in his head." And why not?
  • Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, released as a four-volume work in the 1860s, has been re-released. The Washington Post reports, "In Mayhew one encounters the real-life equivalents of such Charles Dickens characters as Fagin, the Jewish receiver of stolen goods; Krook, the rag-and-bottle-merchant; Jo, the sickly crossing sweeper; and the Artful Dodger, leader of a band of youthful pickpockets."

Responses

  1. Christy Avatar

    Re: the book of a lifetime article: “These arguments in critical theory […] gave way to full-blown structuralism and destroyed any pleasure in imaginative fiction – as far as I was concerned”
    Yeah. That’s my thoughts about literary criticism in general.
    Would you explain more about your thought that she’s off the mark with the religion comment?

  2. Gina Avatar

    She talks about Dickens’s “attacks on . . . religion.” I don’t think that’s quite accurate. He attacked certain elements of religion as it was practiced in his day, and certain religious figures, but not, I think, religion itself.

  3. Fleur Avatar

    Agreed, Gina. If “A Christmas Carol” and the end of “A Tale of Two Cities” is anything to go by, the I think that Dickens did believe in Christianity. I think what he disliked was the the way organized religion had so often strayed so far from the original message.
    Re the story about a local production where Oliver Twist is being played by a girl. It would be quite easy to change the title to “Olivia”

  4. Christy Avatar

    Ah, yes, certainly. Do agree on the religion thing.

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