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Charles Dickens in Biography
Publishers are never slow to realise the potential of a big anniversary, and a raft of Dickens themed publications have hit the shelves in the past few months.
The Dickens 2012 Website
Happily for us the there are three books which deal with Dickens’ life in very different ways.
Perhaps the most conventional is Claire Tomalin’s thorough biography, which mines extensive archives in search of new revelations.
Oxford don Robert Douglas Fairhurst goes back to Dickens’ beginnings, to search for the sometimes traumatic experiences that made the man, and sowed the seeds of the characters he called his “fictional children.”
Simon Callow, perhaps unsurprisingly has alighted on the innate theatricality of the author who often called himself The Sparkler of Albion , with his Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World published on the bicentenary. -
Dickens on Screen
The BFI is celebrating the film and television adaptations of the great master’s work. Featuring both rare and celebrated versions from David Lean’s seminal Oliver Twist to the 1952 TV adaptation of The Pickwick Papers, the Dickens on Screen season runs on the South Bank until March
The BFI Website -
Overshadowed Authors
Dickens’ towering reputation as our greatest Victorian novelist has side-lined many of his contemporaries, so who are some of the lesser-known Victorian writers worth seeking out, and which writers have lingered too long in the shadow of Dickens?
Aspects of the Victorian Novel on the British Library Website
Our panellists recommend some lesser-known female authors - Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Rhoda Broughton – and suggest we look afresh at the works of Thackeray and Nietzsche.
Image of Rhoda Broughton. -
Lucinda Dickens Hawksley's Bookshelf
We caught up with Dickens’ great, great, great grand-daughter and writer Lucinda Dickens Hawksley, she took us through four of her favourite and most cherished titles from her bookshelf.
Lucinda's Website
A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Hideous Kinky by Esther Freud
A Tale of two Cities by Charles Dickens
Credits
- Presenter
- Kirsty Wark
- Participant
- John Carey
- Participant
- Geoff Dyer
- Participant
- Kate Mosse
