Dickens-to-Go was a bi-weekly program of short videos designed to whet the viewers’ appetite for “more” of their favorite author. Dickens Project faculty, friends, and students discussed a favorite passage from Dickens and they found it meaningful.
June 7, 2021
Luckie MacLeary
Tyger Wright describes her fascination with Luckie MacLeary in a passage from Waverley by Walter Scott. The scene takes place with Edward Waverley having a drink with the Laird of Killancureit when he runs into Luckie MacLeary.
May 24, 2021
The Artist at Work
Mike Stern joins us in presenting a passage from Little Dorrit. Mrs. Plornish’s Happy Cottage is detailed and the simple joys it brings to the characters in the story. We are also given a look into Mike Stern’s personal connection with this passage and the memories that are attached to it.
May 10, 2021
Pilgrim’s Progress
Phyllis Orrick discusses Dickens’s response to The Old Curiosity Shop‘s 15th number. Dickens’s attitude toward religion is brought up as he begins to make comments on John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.
April 26, 2021
Mr. Tulkinghorn at Leisure
Dickens Project Director John Jordan is back again with a passage from ‘Bleak House’ regarding Mr. Tulkinghorn and his secretive demeanor. The main focus is on Mr. Tulkinghorn’s indulgence in wine and the mythic allusions that are made in regards to him and Lady Dedlock.
April 12, 2021
The Dombey House
Dickens Project Director John Jordan returns with a passage about the slow and incremental changes tracked within the Dombey household while Mr. Dombey is away. It centers on how the Dombey mansion “becomes almost another character in this wonderful novel.”
March 29, 2021
Dickens the Narrator
Michael Shelichach, a lecturer of English at Queens College, shares a ghastly passage from Oliver Twist with clues to help illuminate Dickens as the writer and narrator.
March 15, 2021
David: Debauched, Dissipated, Drunkd
Dickens Universe devotees Serena Buie, Christian Lehmann, and Mira Rao discuss Chapter 24 of David Copperfield and reflect upon the camaraderie and the darker undertones present in their selected passages.
February 22, 2021
Shipwreck, Storm, and Narrative Disingenuity in David Copperfield
Friends of the Dickens Project Board Member, Wayne Batten, examines narrative evasions, revealing by concealing, and silence as self-deception in David Copperfield.
February 8, 2021
Illustrating The Old Curiosity Shop
Christian Lehmann, Faculty of Literature at Bard High School Early College Cleveland, describes how The Old Curiosity Shop’s illustrators maintained visual cohesion while playfully engaging one another across the weekly parts.
January 25, 2021
Remembering Gerhard Joseph
This week, we will be revisiting Professor Joseph’s “David Copperfield, the Hero of David Copperfield,” from September 28, 2020. In this episode, he asserts that by viewing David Copperfield within the context of the novel, Charles Dickens’s life, and within the reader’s own life, David Copperfield must, indeed, be the hero of his own life.
August 24, 2020
Our Mutual Friend and the Making of the Modern Narrative
Murray Baumgarten, Founding Director of the Dickens Project, describes how Charles Dickens’s innovative use of dynamic visuals changed the narrative form and served as a precursor to early films.
August 17, 2020
When Words Fail: Shakespeare, Dickens, and Lacan
Wayne Batten, Friends of the Dickens Project Board Member, points us to a passage from David Copperfield to demonstrate how the Inimitable conveys the inexpressible.
August 10, 2020
Editorial Metaphysics
Priti Joshi, Professor of English at the University of Puget Sound, directs viewers to an exchange with a minor character in The Pickwick Papers to illustrate the early “Dickensian brilliance in capturing hot air, the sheer absurdity and hollow profundity.”
July 27, 2020
Race, Power and Performance in The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, the William E. “Bud” Davis Alumni Professor of English at Louisiana State University, uses the occasion of a performance to describe the complex power dynamics where “hierarchies of race, gender, pedagogy, performance, and sexual attraction” are at play in The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
July 20, 2020
We must marry ’em
Sophia Jochem, a Ph.D. candidate at Freie Universität Berlin, points us to an interaction between the beadle and the pew-opener in Dombey and Son, to explore issues of money, status, gender, and marriage in Victorian England.
July 13, 2020
Choose Your Own Adventure with Dombey and Son
Long-time Dickens Universe attendee, Christian Lehmann, hosts a Choose Your Own Adventure approach to Dombey and Son, diving into the mechanics of how to read the novel like a Victorian.
July 6, 2020
The Dickensian Reader as Detective
Friends of the Dickens Project Board Member and filmmaker, Michael Stern, discusses how the uncovering of connections between seemingly unconnected places and people in Bleak House can help us to understand societal epidemics.
June 29, 2020
The Best of Times, the Worst of Times
Friends of the Dickens Project President and former Dickens Project Assistant Director, JoAnna Rottke, discusses how the opening paragraph in the first novel she read after joining the Dickens Project is still applicable today.
June 22, 2020
Even Supposing
Renée Fox, the Dickens Project’s Co-Director at UC Santa Cruz, reflects on what Esther Summerson’s experience during the smallpox epidemic in Bleak House might teach us about social distancing and intimacy in the era of COVID-19.
June 15, 2020
Partings Welded Together
Dickens Project Director, John O. Jordan, reflects on partings welded together in the first installment of Dickens-to-Go.
November 2, 2020
Dickens à la Carte
Professor Ian Duncan (UC Berkeley) shares a charming passage from Bleak House in which Mr. Guppy, early in his career as an attorney’s clerk, acts as a generous host. At the same time, Dickens explores theories of early evolutionist science.
October 26, 2020
Dickens, Mesmerism, and Ghosts
Just in time for Halloween, Dr. Romany Reagan explains how the Victorian revival of Mesmerism of the 1830s allowed Dickens to explore “ideas about the workings of the mind [that] come through in his work when you start to see his characters and their hauntings through the lens of his mesmeric philosophy.”
October 19, 2020
The Joy in Dickens
Phyllis Orrick, a former journalist and retired research editor at UC Berkeley, was inspired to embark upon reading Dickens’s fourteen novels in chronological order “by two circumstances that occurred nearly 30 years apart.” She uses the example of The Pickwick Papers to explore themes of poetry, narrative technique, and the aspirational semi-biographical Dickens.
October 12, 2020
Little Dorrit and Arthur Clennam: A Modest Life of Usefulness and Happiness
In this week’s installment, Peter Ponzio, a tutor at Harrison Middleton University and instructor at Loyola University of Chicago, examines “the fallen state of mankind” Dickens creates within and outside of the Marshalsea Prison in Little Dorrit. While happiness is possible, no one is free from prison’s lasting effects.
October 5, 2020
Edwin Drood: A Mystery to the Very End
Friends of the Dickens Project Board Member and published author, Carl Wilson, describes Dickens’s final novel’s instant success, along with the effect of its sudden conclusion.
September 28, 2020
David Copperfield: The Hero of David Copperfield
Gerhard Joseph, Professor Emeritus of the City University of New York, asserts that by viewing David Copperfield within the context of the novel, Charles Dickens’s life, and within the reader’s own life, David Copperfield must, indeed, the hero of his own life.
September 21, 2020
Delicious Passages from Great Expectations
Citing delicious passages from chapters 1 and 2 of Great Expectations, Dickens Project Director, John O. Jordan, underscores how the oral and aural pleasures of reading Dickens aloud can provide more clues to the story.
September 14, 2020
How to Handle an Old Book
Have you ever wanted to learn more about rare and antiquarian books? Tim Clark, Chairman of the Greater Riverside Area Dickens Fellowship and Friends of the Dickens Project Board Member, provides an introduction to the care required to handle old and rare books.
September 7, 2020
Concerning Bella’s Husband
UC Santa Cruz undergraduate student, Helen Everbach, demonstrates how Dickens captures a loving and intimate moment between newlyweds, Bella Wilfer and John Rokesmith, in Our Mutual Friend.
August 31, 2020
Government: How Not to Do It
Bill Jordan, a public servant for around forty years, uses the Circumlocution Office’s example to show how artfully Dickens portrays “the foibles of government bureaucracy.”
January 18, 2021
Dickens’s Favorite Son
Phyllis Orrick, a former journalist and retired research editor at UC Berkeley returns to discuss a novel “built around a character who represents the purest version of the ideal of the boy-child/son Dickens so often alludes to with obvious affection throughout his works,” Barnaby Rudge.
January 11, 2021
Conscience is a Dreadful [and Slippery] Thing
Summer Star, Associate Professor of English at San Francisco State University, shares a passage from Great Expectations about moral consciousness. She describes it as “one of the most brilliant, humorous, and physical allegories for moral discomfort I have ever encountered: having a slice of buttered bread down one’s pant leg.”
December 28, 2020
Sounding Out Scrooge
Reading A Christmas Carol aloud brings new immersive delights to the story. Helene Androski retired Reference and Instruction Librarian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison demonstrates with a favorite passage describing Scrooge.
December 21, 2020
The Carol Philosophy
Carl Wilson, Friends of the Dickens Project Board Member, discusses the charity, altruism, and redemption behind Dickens’s Carol Philosophy.
December 14, 2020
When the Miser Met the Martian: A Sci-Fi Dickensian Drama
Marty Gould, Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern Florida, describes how Dickens’s Christmas classic is an inventive reimagining via a popular interest in interplanetary communication, Richard Ganthony’s play A Message from Mars gave A Christmas Carol a timely update.
December 7, 2020
Marley’s Chains
Susan Zieger, Professor of English at UC Riverside, discusses two essential elements in the interactions between Ebenezer Scrooge and Jacob Marley’s Ghost in Stave One of A Christmas Carol: humor as a counterpoint to the last judgment and the metaphor of the chain.
November 30, 2020
Wilkins Micawber
Friends of the Dickens Project Board Member and Dickens Universe auctioneer, Tim Clark, reprises his role from the 2009 Dickens Universe Farce as Wilkins Micawber.
November 23, 2020
A Green Old Age
In this week’s installment, Tyger Wright, a Santa Cruz based artist, highlights a passage in Barnaby Rudge where Dickens pays “tender attention to a population that is often marginalized, our elders.”
November 16, 2020
Looking Before and After: Plotting with David Copperfield
Citing two pivotal passages from David Copperfield, Friends of the Dickens Project Board Member, Wayne Batten, illuminates the links connecting Clara Copperfield, Betsey Trotwood, and Dora Copperfield.
November 9, 2020
Hairdresser Heroine
With over one thousand created characters, it has been said that one will never meet a person whom they hadn’t encountered within the pages of a Charles Dickens novel. In David Copperfield, retired clergyman Larry Hicks finds a heroine who reminds him of a childhood friend.