Category: Dickens-to-Go

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.

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.’

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.

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.”

Michael Shelichach, a lecturer at Queens College, shares a ghastly passage from Oliver Twist with clues to help illuminate Dickens as the writer and narrator. 

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.

Friends of the Dickens Project Board Member, Wayne Batten, examines narrative evasions, revealing by concealing, and silence as self-deception in David Copperfield.

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.

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.

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. TRANSCRIPT: Hello again, I am Phyllis Orrick and I couldn’t help…

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.” TRANSCRIPT: Hello: I’m Summer Star, Associate Professor…