The 45th annual Dickens Universe was held at John R. Lewis College/College 10 at the University of California at Santa Cruz, July 20-26. The book this year was The Old Curiosity Shop. There were 172 people registered; 26 of those attended virtually.

The week started out with questions about narrators and protagonists. Teresa Mangum of the University of Iowa gave the opening lecture Sunday night, “Curious Old Age in The Old Curiosity Shop,” saying the book was “an attack on all things old.” She showed a number of Victorian paintings illustrating how elder family members remain at the margins of the group. Yet, she pointed out, without the grandfather, Nell would have no plot at all, meaning that the grandfather, despite his age, is the real protagonist of the novel. He, in fact, does change after Nell’s death, and “suffers the consequence of his actions,” while Nell remains the same. The evening lecture is always followed by a film; this year’s offerings included “The History of Punch and Judy Shows,” 1975’s “Mr. Quilp,” and 1979’s “Old Curiosity Shop.” 

As always during this week, the participants on Monday mornings attended faculty-led workshops, a Nineteenth-Century Seminar, or graduate student workshops, and then gathered again for a morning lecture. Monday’s was by Daniel Novak of the University of Alabama, titled “Magic Reel: Photography, Theatre, and Narrative in The Old Curiosity Shop.” Novak called the novel a “fusion of realism and theatrical performance,” He noted that plays and other shows grew out of this book, including a magic lantern slide show, in color. But unlike still photographs, this melodrama is a narrative, although Dickens does “appeal to photographic imagery” in the performers Nell meets. He also, unlike photography, “tells us what is trivial.” At the end, Dickens says, “The magic reel, which, rolling on before, has led the chronicler thus far, now slackens in its pace, and stops” (Chapter 73). Is this a reference to the magic lantern? That’s Novak’s interpretation.

After the morning lecture, participants attended graduate student-led workshops on the novel, and after lunch, there are a multitude of activities, including Dickensian Seminars, undergraduate and graduate student seminars, a Wednesday field trip to UCSC’s Arboretum, repeat showings of the films, and the Victorian Teas Monday through Thursday.  “Talks” were offered at 4:00, including Carolyn Williams of Rutgers on “How Melodrama Works,” Jonathan Grossman of UCLA on “The Tragedy Tolled in Clock,” and high school teachers Clark Cloyd and Catherine Springer of The Paideia School in Atlanta and Ray Crosby of Kern Valley High School in Lake Isabella on “Teaching Dickens at the High School Level.” Victorian Dance Lessons, Dickensian Needlepoint lessons, and farce rehearsals were also held in the afternoons. John Jordan’s Wednesday afternoon talk, “Dickens and Soundscape: The Old Curiosity Shop” was canceled because John tested positive for COVID. It will be made available to attendees at some time in the near future. Post-prandial potations, book sales, T-shirt sales, and silent auctions preceded evening presentations Monday through Thursday.

The Monday evening lecture, “Whose Novel Is This, Anyway? Speech and Character in The Old Curiosity Shop,” was given by Tara K. Menon of Harvard University. She returned to the question of “Who’s the protagonist?” by presenting a study of “direct speech” in the novel. Student assistants tabulated total speech, characters, when they speak, how much, when, and to whom in a number of Victorian novels. The Old Curiosity Shop, Menon said, is unusual when the results are compared. Usually, the protagonist speaks the most (this tabulation tracked only the times that characters speak, not the number of words). In this novel, Quilp does the most talking, and even Dick Swiveller speaks more than Nell does. Also, the connections among characters are different. The central character in a novel is usually connected to the most characters by speech. Pip, David Copperfield, and Esther Summerson all come out on top when these numbers are run. But not Nell; there is actually no character in the “most connections” spot. In this study, Dick Swiveller comes the closest to the traditional protagonist. What if, Menon asked, we recognize that there is no protagonist? That this isn’t a novel at all, but, maybe, just a “tale,” as the frontispiece indicates?

On Tuesday morning, Jacob Risinger of Ohio State shifted the focus of the week somewhat from protagonists to “enoughness” in his lecture “Sure Enough.” He started by outlining the grandfather’s abdication of the role of parent and Nell’s “enough is enough” decision to take over that role. “Enoughness,” he said, can mean both sufficiency and excess, as in “I have enough” and the “Enough!” shouted to stop something unwanted. There was, he said, a “confluence of deficiency and excess” in Victorian England as the industrialized economy came into being–people were not seeking a perfect world, but one with more than they had. “Enoughness” is defined differently by different characters–Nell just wants a world where she doesn’t have to worry about money; the Marchioness indicates that she has “enough” food although her eyes are hungry; Quilp can never have enough.

On Tuesday evening, Maha Jafri of Sewanee: The University of the South, gave a lecture titled “Curiouser and Curiouser: The Uncanny and the Size of Life.” She compared Nell to Alice, who finds herself bigger, and then smaller; Nell is consistently little. In fact, she said, there is a “peculiar youthfulness” in much of Dickens–Amy Dorrit, Jo the crossing sweeper, Tiny Tim, Little Emily, Pip (whom Joe G. calls “uncommon small”). Here, there are “disturbing doubles” in other short people in the novel. Quilp is small, but he is a “little monster” which is a contradiction in terms–monsters are large, as is the giant figurehead that Quilp thinks looks like Kit. When Nell mends the Judy puppet, Jafri said, she helps a smaller thing as well as the adults around her– “Little Nell, not so little, for once.”

Galia Benziman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, spoke on “Seeing in the Dark: Preservation and Object Attachment in Master Humphrey’s Clock and The Old Curiosity Shop” on Wednesday morning, saying that the relationships that characters have with objects is “a shaping factor in the mode of writing.” Often, she said, characters cannot see clearly in Dickens’s novels, meaning that physical objects are often “imbued with subjective memory” and can become an extension of the self. And objects, she pointed out, are mentioned in both the titles that apply to this book: Master Humphrey’s Clock and The Old Curiosity Shop. Both the clock and the shop hold things inside–yet both are “dark and silent” inside on their own. The recollections of the things for the characters are actually illusions, while realism was being favored in fiction. The gothic, Benziman said, was being replaced at the time Dickens started to write, yet he continued to include it.

Wednesday evening was left free for people to go to town if they wished, but for those who stayed, a singalong was held in the lecture hall, featuring everything from Joan Baez and Bob Dylan to Hank Williams. On Thursday morning, Helena Michie and Ph.D. candidate Huw Edwardes-Evans of Rice University and Robyn Warhol of Ohio State presented another computer-based project titled “Project Endings.” This project also used student assistants, who coded the structures used in the beginnings and endings of the numbers of Victorian serial novels. This project, said the speakers, is “an attempt to let go” of the conception that Dickens relied on “cliffhangers” at the end of each number to keep readers coming back. In fact, this study found, 28.70% of Dickens’s endings contain a “climax,” with no suspense; 14% are “plain old character description,” 7.10% are jokes, 6.10% are tableaux, and 3.30 are soapbox (preaching) endings. Of the beginnings of the next numbers, 57.20% are “break and refocus,” 42.8% are “continuation variations,” 18.7% are place descriptions, 17.9% are character descriptions, 4.0% are jokes, and 3.3% are flashbacks. This novel, the study reveals, “pulls against serial narrativity,” and lets us see the real rhythm of the book. “Project Endings” is ongoing and invites volunteers; the speakers also invited faculty and graduate students to borrow from the results. Read more about it at https://rs4vp.org/join-the-project-endings-team/.

On Thursday evening, Adam Abraham’s farce, this year titled “Curiosity Killed the Shop: A Dickensian Travesty,” delighted all with its premise: In a university lab somewhere in the U.S., an AI interactive version of Charles Dickens, called AC/DC and played by Robyn Warhol, has been created. Into it has been fed Dickens’s complete works, maps of London, applicable travel books, and so on. AC/DC now can answer questions only Charles Dickens would know the answer to: What book did you plan after Edwin Drood? Greater Expectations. Do Pip and Estella end up together? Yes, but then they get divorced. The farce continues with its well-loved tropes as characters appear–songs set to familiar tunes (“More Than a Servant to Me” sung by Dick Swiveller and set to the Bee Gees’ “More than a Woman,” although Dick spoke mainly in Beatles’ lyrics); references to the weeks’ lectures and themes (Sally asks Quilp, “Do you have enough?” and at one point a graph of “direct speech” appears on the screen above the cast); and references to other novels (when Kit is arrested, his mother calls upon the Cheeryble Brothers and Mr. Brownlow). And one lecturer during the week asked people to raise their hands if The Old Curiosity Shop was their favorite novel–no hands went up. This was reflected in song lyrics: “Scenes so pathetic you just have to look/Now you know why it’s my favorite book.” Of course Little Nell and her grandfather are center stage much of the time, at one point arriving at the Frank Sinatra Service Area on the Golden State Parkway, and they are joined by Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness, Mrs. Jarley, Sally and Sampson, Quilp, and even Oscar Wilde. At the end, the professor chides, “I think something is wrong with your AI.” The merriment of the farce extended to Thursday night’s Grand Party, wonderfully presented by Sandy Bieler and her team in the Namaste Lounge. 

Friday morning’s “lecture” was in the form of a roundtable made up of all of the week’s speakers, moderated by Aman Garcha of Ohio State. Attendees were asked to bring a passage from the novel and read it aloud to have the panel comment on it. A number of ideas came to light in this discussion. In response to one reader, Galia Benziman pointed out that “we know nothing about Nell except what she feels for her grandfather.” Robyn Warhol mentioned that many of the shops in Dickens, like the grandfather’s shop, don’t ever seem to have customers:  Krook’s shop in Bleak House, the Wooden Midshipman in Dombey and Son. Venus’s shop in Our Mutual Friend has few customers, and they don’t buy the real curiosities. Aman Garcha mentioned “the true protagonist: Whisker the pony.” And Helena Michie asked if the narrator “is uneasy about what he set in motion with Kit and Nell.” Does he “turn it around” by adding Barbara?

On Friday evening, a “Curiosity Gala to Celebrate 45 Years of the Universe” was held. The Gala started with the Friends of the Dickens Project’s fundraising auction, organized by Tim Clark. This year the combination of silent and live auctions garnered $11,675, with $4,500 of that amount coming from the auction of the “Old Curiosity Shop” quilt designed and sewn by Carolyn Oppenheim Schwartz. After that, next year’s book was announced (Bleak House), and the traditional Victorian Dance, led by dance instructor Annie Laskey, was held, with music by the Great Expectations Orchestra. During the dance, casino tables were also in operation, a nod to the Old Curiosity Shop’s gambling theme. The public was invited to the event at $50 per person, with proceeds going to the Friends of the Dickens Project.

Dates for the 2026 Dickens Universe will be announced at the start of the year, when registration usually opens.