Dickens 2021 Project

We want to thank all of you for going on this fantastic Dickens adventure with us this year. Whether you finished all the novels or not, it has been a wonderful experience reading with you!

Although we read Dickens’s novels in the order in which they were published in our Dickens 2021 Project this year, we saved the five Dickens Christmas novellas, published between 1843-1848, for the Christmas holiday season. 

A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas (December 1843)

The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In (December 1844)

The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home (December 1845)

The Battle of Life: A Love Story (December 1846)

The Haunted Man & the Ghost’s Bargain, A Fancy for Christmas-Time (December 1848)

In this, our final official post for the Project, we share just a few ways to enjoy the novellas and learn more about the stories behind the stories.

Listen to the Christmas stories on Librivox:

A Christmas Carol 

The Chimes 

The Cricket on the Hearth

The Battle of Life 

The Haunted Man & the Ghost’s Bargain

Watch adaptations of some of the tales (some IMDB matches may not be to adaptations, so check records before you watch!):

A Christmas Carol

The Chimes

The Cricket on the Hearth

Read about Christmas traditions and their origins in Victorian Christmas by Judith Flanders and more specifically about Charles Dickens and the Victorian Christmas Feast by Simon Callow on the British Library Discovering Literature site.  

Renata Goroshkova discusses the novellas’ reception in one part of the world in her blog post The Reception of Charles Dickens’s Christmas Stories of the 1840s in Russia up to 1917 on The Dickens Society site. Goroshkova also provides an interesting analysis on Dickens’s use of framework images in another two-part post entitled Crossing the Borders: Windows and Thresholds in Dickens’s Christmas Stories of the 1840s.

Learn a bit more about the background context for and importance of A Christmas Carol in a short video by Michael Slater and a related article by John Sutherland in The Origins of A Christmas Carol from the British Library. 

Further attention is given to the ghosts of the story in John Mullan’s Ghosts in A Christmas Carol also on the British Library Discovering Literature site. 

And, finally, there is a wealth of information about the novellas on The Victorian Web, including links to the original illustrations. 

April 1870 – September 1870

Congratulations, Dickensians, we’ve made it to the last, and most mysterious of Dickens’s novels! Dickens did not share his plans for the novel’s resolution, but before the serial was abruptly interrupted by Dickens’s death on June 9, 1870, he implied that Drood’s uncle murdered young Edwin. But did he? Was Edwin Drood actually murdered? Did he fake his own death?? After all, this is a Dickens novel, so anything is possible.

Here are some resources if you want to learn more:

The Charles Dickens Page provides an abundance of resources, including a useful map, a complete description of characters, and a facsimile of the final page written by Dickens’s hand: https://www.charlesdickenspage.com/charles-dickens-the-mystery-of-edwin-drood.html.

The original illustrations are also found on the Charles Dickens Page: https://www.charlesdickenspage.com/illustrations-edwin-drood.html.

If you have Britbox, you can watch the 2012 BBC adaptation: https://www.amazon.com/Mystery-Edwin-Drood-Season/dp/B00DHXIN9W/ref=tmm_aiv_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=.

Some Early Dramatic Solutions to Dickens’ Unfinished Mystery, courtesy of The Victorian Web: https://victorianweb.org/mt/adaptations/39.html.

Rupert Holmes’s clever approach to “solving the mystery” was to create a musical and allow audience members to vote on the ending: https://stageagent.com/shows/musical/2412/the-mystery-of-edwin-drood.

The Haunting Mystery of ‘Edwin Drood’ That Charles Dickens Left Behind
“When Charles Dickens died, he left behind an unfinished book containing unresolved mysteries. In ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood,’ who killed Drood—and is Drood really dead?” https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-haunting-mystery-of-edwin-drood-that-charles-dickens-left-behind.

1864 – 1865

This is the last full-sized, complete novel in our Dickens reading challenge!

Start here for an assortment of interesting facts about Our Mutual Friend on the Charles Dickens Page.  

‘Our Mutual Friend’ and the Making of the Modern Narrative
In this short video, Murray Baumgarten, Founding Director of the Dickens Project, describes how Charles Dickens’s innovative use of dynamic visuals in Our Mutual Friend changed the narrative form and served as a precursor to early films. 

Also check out the Dickens Project’s Our Mutual Friend: The Scholarly Pages for more on the novel. Did you know that Henry James called Dickens “the greatest of superficial novelists?” Here is James’ scathing review of Our Mutual Friend.

The following is an assortment of essays exploring a variety of themes found within Our Mutual Friend: 

• Who’s That in Charge? It’s Jenny Wren, ‘The Person of the House’
  “While several Dickens characters fit binary stereotypes of the disabled (pitiful/helpless; monstrous/villainous), Jenny Wren, the dolls’ dressmaker in Our Mutual Friend, creates a unique and constructive life with regards to her infirmities.”

• Our Mutual Friend is as wildly overblown as the society it depicted
  “From rapacious capitalists and martyrs to poverty to ‘dropsical’ pubs teetering over the Thames, Dickens’s novel was faithful to a far-fetched reality.”

• Decadence and Renewal in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend
  “…dying and being restored from death are both a metaphor for the literal events of the novel and a symbol of moral regeneration.”

Read the original serial here! The University of Victoria’s 19th Century Serials collection.

The 1998 BBC film adaptation of Our Mutual Friend is available via Amazon Prime. 

And finally, Illustrations by James Mahoney for Charles Dickens’ works collected in their entirety on The Victorian Web: 

1860 – 1861

As with several of the other novels we’ve read, Stanford’s Discovering Dickens makes available a serialized version of Great Expectations along with notes and explanations of allusions and references to help enrich your reading experience: http://dickens.stanford.edu/dickens/archive/great/expectations.html. Like A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations first appeared in Dickens’s weekly journal All the Year Round. The story began in the December 1, 1860 issue and ended in the issue from August 3, 1861.

Dickens-to-Go from UC Santa Cruz’s The Dickens Project provides a couple of video clips of readings from Great Expectations that may be of interest:

1. John O. Jordan, Professor of Literature and Director of The Dickens Project reads a couple of his favorite selections from the novel in “Delicious Passages from ‘Great Expectations’” (Sept. 2020): https://dickens.ucsc.edu/programs/dickens-to-go/delicious-passages.html.
   
2. Summer Star, Professor of English, shares one of her favorite passages from the novel in “Conscience is a Dreadful [and Slippery] Thing” (Jan. 2021): https://dickens.ucsc.edu/programs/dickens-to-go/conscience-a-dreadful-thing.html.

If you want to listen to a full audio recording of the novel, there are three versions available on LibriVox: https://librivox.org/search?q=great%20expectations&search_form=advanced.

A number of film and television versions of the story have been released: https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?title=Great%20Expectations&title_type=feature,tv_movie,tv_miniseries&view=advanced (note – the documentaries on architecture and education on this list are not adaptations of the novel!).

Learn more about particular themes in Great Expectations in articles from the British Library including: 

• “Crime in Great Expectations” by John Mullan, May 2017: https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/crime-in-great-expectations
  
• “Great Expectations and class” by John Bowen, May 2014: https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/great-expectations-and-class
  
• “The Gothic in Great Expectations” by John Bowen, May 2014: https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/the-gothic-in-great-expectations 

Finally, you can view 18 illustrations depicting Miss Havisham (one of my favorite characters) on the Victorian Web: https://victorianweb.org/art/illustration/ge/havisham.html. Below are a couple to enjoy:

April 1859 – November 1859

The serialized version of A Tale of Two Cities, originally published in All the Year Round from April 30, 1859 to November 26, 1859, is available on Stanford University’s Discovering Dickens site: http://dickens.stanford.edu/dickens/archive/tale/two_cities.html. Along with PDFs of the novel in its original form, the site provides brief historical context for both the time in which the novel is set (1757-1794) and the year in which it was written. Notes, illustrations, and further historical context are provided with each of the fifteen issues.

Several audio recordings of readings of the novel can be found on LibriVox: https://librivox.org/search?q=a%20tale%20of%20two%20cities&search_form=advanced. 

The Charles Dickens Museum in London owns Dickens’s annotated reading copy of The Bastille Prisoner, a version of Book 1 of A Tale of Two Cities that Dickens adapted for public reading, but, according to the Museum site, never performed. An image of the cover of the work and an example of Dickens’s many annotations are available below, but interested readers can also download a full digitized copy of the book, if interested, from the Museum’s site: http://www.collections.dickensmuseum.com/object–lib-6689–1971-1-96 (under Related Documents).

There are many film adaptations out there. Here is a list of titles, but there are many more. Beware, not every “Tale of Two Cities” is about the cities we’re reading about! https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?title=%22a+tale+of+two+cities%22&title_type=feature,tv_movie,tv_miniseries. 

David Perdue provides a timeline of events from the novel as well as maps of locations in the novel on his Charles Dickens Page: https://www.charlesdickenspage.com/charles-dickens-a-tale-of-two-cities.html that might be useful for reference as you read. 

Finally, if you’re looking for articles related to the novel, check out The Victorian Web: https://victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/2cities/index.html. A couple that piqued our interest:

1. “The French Revolution in the Popular Imagination: A Tale of Two Cities” by Meltem Kiran-Raw.
2. “Images of the French Revolution from Various Editions of A Tale of Two Cities (1859-1910)” by Philip V. Allingham.

1855 – 1857

If you’re keeping up with our reading schedule, we’ve only got four (and a half – The Mystery of Edwin Drood was unfinished when Dickens died) novels and some short stories to go! 

Little Dorrit, published in serial form 1855-57, takes a look at prisoners of many sorts and satirizes the Victorian era government and society.  David Perdue summarizes the novel, writing: 

“In his eleventh novel, illustrated by Phiz and published by Bradbury and Evans, Charles Dickens’ childhood memories of his father’s imprisonment in the Marshalsea for debt are brought forth again as the centerpiece of the story of William Dorrit, whose family is also imprisoned there.

Dickens sets the novel in the 1820’s, around the time his father was an inmate in the Marshalsea, but virtually ignores that time period during the novel in favor of the present time (mid 1850’s) introducing many anachronisms. The theme of imprisonment, both physical and psychological, carries throughout the novel.“
(Read more at https://www.charlesdickenspage.com/charles-dickens-little-dorrit.html)

As with Dickens’s other novels, you can find copies online for your reading or listening pleasure, if you wish:

Free ebook via Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/963/963-h/963-h.htm

Little Dorrit in its original serial form from the University of Victoria’s Victorian Serial Novels Collection: https://www.uvic.ca/library/research-teaching/collections/serials/LittleDorrit.php

And don’t forget, you can find audiobook recordings on Librivox and Audible. 

Looking for a version to watch? You can find options for watching the 14 episode 2008 BBC miniseries starring Claire Foy, Matthew Macfadyen, and Tom Courtenay at https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1178522/. 

Glorious ironies
“In the exuberant sprawl of Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit, Anne Stevenson discovers a rich and painfully recognisable allegory of our struggle towards disinterested love.”
Introspective essay written by the late British poet, Anne Stevenson, for The Guardian on December 31, 2004. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/jan/01/classics.charlesdickens

Little Dorrit and Arthur Clennam: A Modest Life of Usefulness and Happiness
October 12, 2020 The Dickens Project’s Peter Ponzio examines the “fallen state of mankind” within and outside of the Marshalsea Prison in Little Dorrit.  https://dickens.ucsc.edu/programs/dickens-to-go/a-life-of-usefulness-and-happiness.html

Interesting blog site: https://www.thecircumlocutionoffice.com/littledorrit/
The Circumlocution Office. Defines quotes from Little Dorrit and other Dickens novels.

You can access all of Phiz’s original illustrations on The Victorian Web: Illustrations by “Phiz” (Hablot Knight Browne) for “Little Dorrit,” December 1855 — June 1857

1 April – 12 August 1854

First published in Dickens’s magazine, Household Words, Hard Times was published in 20 weekly installments. The novel can be read in its original serial form through Stanford’s Discovering Dickens project: https://dickens.stanford.edu/dickens/archive/hard/times.html. Although the original weekly serial was not illustrated, the Stanford site also includes links to illustrations from the 1870s edition of the novel that was illustrated by Harry French. Also accompanying the installments are a key to allusions in each issue, a historical glossary including key passages for the text, and contextual information on other articles that appeared in the issue that published that installment. A treasure trove of information for understanding the novel!

A nice overview of one of the key themes of the novel can be found on the British Library’s Discovering Literature site:

“Hard Times: fact and fancy” by Paul Schlicke. 15 May 2014. https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/fact-versus-fancy-in-hard-times 

For your reading pleasure, here are a few other articles/posts that discuss Hard Times (among other works by Dickens): 

• Allingham, Philip V. “Hard Times for these Times: Dickens at 42.” The Victorian Web. https://victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/hardtimes/pva122.html.
  
• Burgess, Catherine. “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Dickens and the Underdog.” Dickens Society Blog post. 27 March 2017. https://dickenssociety.org/archives/1581.
  
• Carlson, Brittany. “Dickens at the Intersection of Literacy and Numeracy Anxieties.” Dickens Society Blog post. 20 November 2020. https://dickenssociety.org/archives/3035.
  
• Sexton, James. “Dickens’ Hard Times and Dystopia” The Victorian Web. https://victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/hardtimes/sexton1.html. 

For your viewing pleasure, there are two award winning series available:

• 1994 BBC miniseries: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109985/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_6
• 1977 miniseries: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077657/

And don’t forget, there is a free audio recording on Librivox: https://librivox.org/hard-times-by-charles-dickens/.

March 1852 – September 1853

August is our month for reading Bleak House (if you’re keeping up with our schedule). Dickens’s 9th novel, Bleak House, like many of the other novels, is filled with a plethora of characters. Having trouble keeping everyone straight? Refer to a handy complete character list (and more) on David Perdue’s page dedicated to the novel on The Charles Dickens Page site: https://www.charlesdickenspage.com/charles-dickens-bleak-house.html.

Looking for a free copy to read? You can find a copy on Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1023/1023-h/1023-h.htm), or, if you prefer, you can read it in its original serial form through Project Boz from Digital WPI: https://digital.wpi.edu/concern/generic_works/qz20sv485?locale=en.

Find Kathryn Hughes’s sassy review of the novel in The Guardian at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/sep/23/charles-dickens-favourite-bleak-house, or, if you want to read further about particular themes and topics, here are some articles to pique your curiosity:

An interesting article on Dickens’s use of bird imagery in Bleak House that won The Dickens Project’s high school student essay contest in 2013: “Birds and Cages in Bleak House,” by Emma Brodey: https://dickens.ucsc.edu/programs/hs-pdfs/emma-brodey.pdf.

For more on epidemics in the time of Dickens, see The New Yorker article, “The Fever Room: Epidemics and Social Distancing in “Bleak House” and “Jane Eyre,” published in March, 2020. Access requires a subscription: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-fever-room-epidemics-and-social-distancing-in-bleak-house-and-jane-eyre.

Read about Dickens’s use of Gothic imagery in the novel in a 2014 article by Greg Buzwell on the British Library’s Discovering Literature site: https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/charles-dickens-victorian-gothic-and-bleak-house.

Many more musings on a variety of topics can be found linked from The Victorian Web’s Bleak House page: https://victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/bleakhouse/index.html.

Also on The Victorian Web, you can find images and commentary on all of the illustrations for the original serial by Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz): https://victorianweb.org/art/illustration/phiz/bleakhouse/index.html.

Want to watch a film version?  The X Files’ Gillian Anderson is a chilling Lady Deadlock in this faithful BBC adaptation: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0442632/.