Category: Dickens-to-Go

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. TRANSCRIPT: Hi, this is Helene Androski sheltering at home in Madison, Wisconsin, and missing all my new made friends from the Dickens universe. I would like to…

Carl Wilson, Friends of the Dickens Project Board Member, discusses the charity, altruism, and redemption behind Dickens’s Carol Philosophy. TRANSCRIPT: I have read A Christmas Carol every year for more than fifty years, facilitated discussions about the story, and even have written a novel loosely structured after Dickens’s first Christmas book. And I have seen at least…

This special holiday lecture by Associate Professor Marty Gould (University of South Florida) is presented as part of the 2020 Dickensian Holiday Weekend.  Inventively reimagining Dickens’s Christmas classic via popular interest in interplanetary communication, Richard Ganthony’s play A Message from Mars gave A Christmas Carol a timely update. A product of the “Mars Mania” of the 1890s, the play is…

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 chain.  TRANSCRIPT: Hello, I’m Susan Zieger. I teach at the University of California Riverside, and…

Tim Clark, Friends of the Dickens Project Board Member and Dickens Universe auctioneer, reprises his role of Wilkins Micawber. TRANSCRIPT: Hello. My name is Tim Clark, and I am the chairman of the greater Riverside area, Dickens Fellowship in Southern California. I’m also on the board for the [Friends of the] Dickens Project for our…

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.” TRANSCRIPT: I am Tyger Wright, sustained thus far in my life by fine arts, literature, and grace. Last year was the best piece of…

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. TRANSCRIPT: Hello, I’m Wayne Batten living in Nashville. I’m a retired school teacher and I’m on the faculty of the Dickens Universe. Today, I’d like to share a favorite…

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. TRANSCRIPT: I’m Larry Hicks and I have to confess I’ve…

In today’s installment, 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.  TRANSCRIPT: Hello, I’m Ian Duncan, and I’m speaking to you from Berkeley, California, locked…

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.” TRANSCRIPT: Did you know that…

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. VIDEO TRANSCRIPT…

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 its lasting effects. VIDEO TRANSCRIPT Hello, my name is Peter…