Discover Dickens
Charles Dickens’s Bicentenary is coming!
Saturday 19 February 2011 | Roehampton University
Keynote speakers: Claire Tomalin, Malcolm Andrews, Michael Eaton
Conference programme
9.30am
Registration (coffee and tea will be served)
10amWelcome
10.15am
Claire Tomalin speaking on Living with Dickens
11.15am
Coffee, tea and biscuits
11.45am
Workshop (choose one from workshops 1–5)
1pm
Lunch (to be provided, please let us know of any dietary preferences)
2pm
Michael Eaton speaking on Beginning at the Beginning
3.15pm
Workshop (choose one from workshops 6–11)
4.30pm
Malcolm Andrews speaking on Dickens the Performer
5.30pm
Sherry and Cake
Keynote Speakers
Claire Tomalin is the author of highly acclaimed biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft, Katherine Mansfield and Jane Austen.
Her account of Charles Dickens’s relationship with the actress Nelly Ternan, The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and
Charles Dickens, was published in 1990 and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for biography), the NCR Book Award
for Non-Fiction and the Hawthornden Prize. It was followed by Mrs Jordan’s Profession (1994), a biography of the actress Dora
Jordan, consort to William IV. Her biography of the seventeenth-century diarist Samuel Pepys (2002) won the the Samuel Pepys
Award, and the 2002 Whitbread Book of the Year award. Her book Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man (2006), was shortlisted for
the British Book Awards Biography of the Year. Most recently she has selected and edited two books of poetry: The Poems of
Thomas Hardy (2007), and The Poems of John Milton (2008). She is currently writing a biography of Charles Dickens.
Michael Eaton, MBE is a screenwriter who specialises in docudrama. His work includes Shipman, Shoot to Kill and Who
Bombed Lockerbie. His fictional work includes Flowers of the Forest and the TV series Signs and Wonders. He has adapted works by
George Eliot and Charles Dickens for BBC Radio 4. Michael Eaton is currently co-curating, with Adrian Wootton, a major retrospective
of Dickens and Film for the National Film Theatre in the bicentenary year of 2012.
Prof Malcolm Andrews, Emeritus Professor was Professor of Victorian and Visual Studies in the School of English until 2009.
He is editor of The Dickensian, the journal of the Dickens Fellowship (founded in 1905). Malcolm Andrews has edited two novels
for the Everyman Dickens series, David Copperfield (1993) and The Pickwick Papers (1998), and is the author of Dickens
on England and the English (1979), Dickens and the Grown-up Child (1995) and most recently, Charles Dickens and His
Performing Selves: Dickens and the Public Readings (2008). Book publications in landscape aesthetics and the visual arts
include The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760-1800 (1989) and The
Picturesque: Sources and Documents (1994).
Discover Dickens
Workshop 1 — Making Sense of History: Religion, Serialisation & A Tale of Two Cities
Critics have sometimes struggled to make sense of A Tale of Two Cities (1859). The novel has been accused, among other things, of
lacking the depth of Dickens’s darker works and relying too heavily on sentimental language and imagery. One of the elements that
seems to have alienated some modern critics is the weight of religious references in the novel. Insisting that Dickens’s writing lends
itself to religious readings, this workshop will think about how ideas of religious conversion influence the novel. We will think particularly
about the relationship between such ideas and the form of publication in which the novel first appeared. A Tale of Two Cities was the
first serialised novel in All the Year Round, the periodical that Dickens ‘conducted’ from 1859.
Dr Mark Knight is Reader in English Literature at Roehampton. His publications include Chesterton and Evil, Nineteenth-Century
Religion and Literature: An Introduction (co-authored with Emma Mason), and An Introduction to Religion and Literature. He is
currently writing a book on Evangelicalism and the Nineteenth-Century Novel.
Workshop 2 —Dickens, Christmas and White Slavery: the role of the distressed
needlewoman in The Chimes
This workshop will look at the ways in which Dickens incorporated into his second Christmas story the shocking revelations about
the plight of London’s thousands of poverty-stricken and exploited female needleworkers. Immortalised by Thomas Hood’s poem
‘The Song of the Shirt’, which appeared in Punch at the end of 1843, the distressed needlewoman became an icon of the failures of
Victorian society. Key questions to be addressed are: did Dickens merely cash on the theme’s topicality? Did he sentimentalize and
‘make safe’ this controversy? How does Dickens’s approach compare with other literary and visual representations of this scandal?
Preparation: Charles Dickens, The Chimes; Thomas Hood, ‘The Song of the Shirt’ (google).
Ian Haywood is Professor of English at Roehampton University. His publications include The Revolution in Popular literature
1790–1860 (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Bloody Romanticism (Palgrave, 2006). He is currently researching a book on
Romanticism and caricature.
Workshop 3 —Dickens and Urania Cottage, the Home for Fallen Women
In 1847 Dickens set up a home for fallen women in Shepherd’s Bush, and for over a decade he was closely involved in its running.
The young women came from the streets, sweatshops and prisons of London; Dickens’s idea was to train them, reinvent them as
domestic servants, and send them abroad to start new lives. This illustrated talk describes life at Urania Cottage and asks: what
happened to these young women, and what was their impact on Dickens’s fiction?
Jenny Hartley is Head of English and Creative Writing at Roehampton University. Her book, Charles Dickens and the House of
Fallen Women was published by Methuen in 2008 (pbk 2009), and has been enthusiastically reviewed: “Jenny Hartley’s brilliant book
fills a gap in Dickens studies. Vivid, intelligent and enthralling.” Claire Tomalin, The Guardian; “Jenny Hartley’s excellent new book
tells this extraordinary story with compassion, common sense and a lively awareness.” John Bowen, Times Literary Supplement.
Jenny is currently editing a selection of Dickens’s letters for Oxford University Press.
Workshop 4 — Dickens and his Monsters: the Art of Hyperreality
Bill Sikes and Fagin! Quilp! Wackford Squeers! Mrs Gamp and Pecksniff! Dickens’s early novels – Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old
Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit — teem with leering, lascivious, greedy, egotistical, manipulative monsters. With their gargantuan
appetites and energy they lie at the centre of Dickens’s art – amoral life forces that reflect the anarchic demands of early industrial
capitalist society in all its grotesque trickery, its cruelty and extravagant display. They feed off the innocent victims – Oliver, Little Nell,
Smike,Tom Pinch – who seem to be able to offer only passive resistance to their menace. But the menace is also a dangerous and
disturbing attractiveness, a part of which this workshop intends to illustrate and explore. Thus we come to understand that unique
combination of theatricality and extraordinary psychological insight that will ripen in the later novels, though never perhaps match
the spectacular power of the early work. I want to suggest some interesting and useful analogies between Dickens’s working methods and those of a generation of American and British artists – the Pop and Hyper-realists of the 1960s and 1970s - who responded
in analogous ways to a world of burgeoning commodities and contested moralities in another period of capitalist expansion.
Simon Edwards has published essays on the work of Dickens as well as on the historical fiction of his great predecessors –
Walter Scott and Fenimore Cooper.
Workshop 5 — Dickens and Race, the Influence of Science
‘There are not many places that I find it more agreeable to revisit when I am in an idle mood, than some places to which I have never
been.’ (Dickens, Nurse’s Stories, 1860)
Dickens’s enthralment with places he has never been, i.e. places of the imagination, remains undiminished throughout his life.
Significantly, these places he has never been are peopled with people whom he has never met, stereotypes of exotic racial
difference. However, unlike his attraction to exotic imaginary places, Dickens’s attraction to exotic peoples undergoes a significant
change largely due to his avid adult engagement with the development of scientific thought which constructed notions of race
largely in terms of civilisation and savagery. This illustrated talk will explore Dickens’s lifelong relationship with race as mediated by both
science and fancy. Key questions to be considered are: What did race mean for Dickens? How does Dickens represent race in his
writing? How did he influence cultural perceptions of race?
Dr Laura Peters is Principal Lecturer in English Literature at Roehampton University. Her publications include: Orphan Texts: Victorian
Orphans, Culture and Empire (MUP, 2000) and articles on Dickens, race, and orphans in Philip Pullman. She is currently writing a book on
Dickens and Race to be published by MUP during Dickens’s bicentenary in 2012.
Workshop 6 — Downsizing Dickens: adaptations of Oliver Twist for the contemporary child reader
Contemporary revisions of Oliver Twist reflect, to some degree, the dominant ideologies of the society in which the text is
produced, and some adaptations for children would seem to insist on the notion of childhood innocence by discarding the violent
and/or potentially inflammatory details of Dickens’s text. However, other adaptations appear actively to foster an interest in the
source novel and its historicity by acknowledging these ‘less palatable’ emphases. The workshop will explore how adaptations of
Dickens’s novel can be seen as useful introductions to his text or, conversely, as an impoverishment of the source material (with
particular reference to Fagin, his gang and violence). It will also discuss the broader issue of censorship in adaptations of classic
literature for children. After a brief introduction, participants will have the opportunity to browse a selection of adaptations and to
detail their findings in group discussion. If you have your own versions, please bring them along.
Dr. Liz Thiel is a Senior Lecturer at Roehampton University, where she teaches Children’s Literature at both undergraduate and
postgraduate levels. Recent publications include The Fantasy of Family: Nineteenth-century literature and the myth of the
domestic ideal (Routledge, 2008) and her current research is on the degenerate child in nineteenth-century fiction.
Workshop 7 —Dickens and Food
When we think of Dickens we think of food: the whitebait feast in Greenwich in Our Mutual Friend, the biggest turkey in the shop
bought for the Cratchits by the reformed Scrooge: his novels bulge with a zesty appreciation of the mouth-filling and succulent.
And yet most of the food we encounter in his pages is curiously resistant: it is food to see rather than eat, all too often just out
of reach, behind the windows of too-expensive pastry shops, burnt by incompetent servants or wheedled away by manipulative
ones. Miss Havisham’s mouldering wedding cake, long transmuted beyond any practical status as food; the unopenable oysters of
David and Dora Copperfield’s first dinner party; the denied second bowl of gruel. In this paradoxical sense of food as both
nourishing and withheld, Dickens is very much of his time: nineteenth-century food writing is shot through with intense anxiety,
confusion and guilt about food and its consumption.
This workshop will look closely at some key culinary passages from a selection of Dickens’s novels, thinking about how they
operate in the context of the narrative and relating them to other contemporary discourses about food from cook books,
journalism, and other novels.
Nicki Humble is the author of Culinary Pleasures: Cook Books and the Transformation of British Food (Faber, 2005) (Food Book
of the Year, The Guild of Food Writers), which was very positively reviewed: ‘This is a terrific book: a thoughtful, intelligent, highly
readable account of the influence of the written word on Britain’s culinary habits... this is a book which speaks from the heart as
well as the head. Don’t miss a word.’ - Elisabeth Luard, Literary Review, Nov 2005; ‘This book deserves the attention of every
thoughtful foodie and though I fear it won’t pip Jamie in the bestseller lists this Christmas, this would be a better country if it did.’ Ian Irvine, Independent on Sunday, 6 Nov 2005. She edited Mrs Beeton’s Household Management for Oxford World’s Classics,
and has just published Cake: A Global History (Reaktion Books, 2010)
Workshop 8 —Balancing Books, By Popular Demand, Haunts and Hangouts, Seeing Things and Dickens and the Gothic
Dickens on the Curriculum? Find out what we do at The Charles Dickens Museum to enrich your students’ study of the text. In
partnership with The British Library, the Museum is offering five workshops as part of the Literature in Context Programme. Using
material from the Library and the Collection at Doughty Street, we aim to explore the context in which Dickens’s work was created
and received.
Playbills, coins, ledgers, serial parts, maps, illustrations, letters, pinhole cameras and spectacles are just some of the artefacts
used to explore the work of Dickens. Try out our taught sessions during the breakout session to discover more.
Sue Walker is Learning Programmes Manager at The Charles Dickens Museum, 48 Doughty Street, London, WC1N 2LX
(020 7405 2127, [email protected])
Workshop 9 —How to Read a Page of Dickens
After David Copperfield has begun his successful career as a novelist he meets once again with his old Yarmouth acquaintance,
the retired and now bed-ridden undertaker Mr Omer, who tells him:
‘And since I’ve taken to general reading, you’ve taken to general writing, eh, sir?... What a lovely work that was of yours! What
expressions in it! I read it every... every word. And as to feeling sleepy not at all!’
Thus playfully Dickens solicits our attention to a wakeful reading of ‘every word’ of his own work. We know that Dickens wrote
quickly to tight deadlines – the early manuscripts contain hardly any revisions on the page. Reading slowly and closely, however,
we encounter a dense fabric of poetic prose that not only invokes the material world and nuances of human behaviour in all their
rich specificity but, at the same time, is more widely allusive than any in English fiction. If Dickens’s characters seem to live off the
page, it is because they live so powerfully ‘in’ and ‘on’ the page.
So we shall take a handful of pages from different novels, and there we shall find those extraordinary insights into the unconscious
and the world of dreams; the articulation of the intimate relations between private and public experience; the comedy and the
horror of everyday life; the almost infinite proliferation of Dickens’s imagination; a perpetual act of creation and re-creation….and
‘as to feeling sleepy not at all!’
Simon Edwards has published essays on the work of Dickens as well as on the historical fiction of his great predecessors –
Walter Scott and Fenimore Cooper.
Cathy Wells Cole has taught Victorian Literature at Roehampton University for many years.
Workshop 10 — Dickens the journalist
A big part of Charles Dickens’s appeal is the rich mix of imagination and real-life detail, gleaned in large part from the years he
spent as a reporter. In addition, Dickens devoted a large part of his life as an editor of two weekly magazines, serialising several of
his own novels and publishing the work of many other authors. But although the influence of the journalism on his fiction has come
under scrutiny, relatively little attention has been given to the journalism in its own right.
More recently, the growth of interest in book history and material culture, and the development of the Digital Humanities, has
opened up new ways of looking at this body of work. One example is a project called Dickens Journals Online (DJO) at the
University of Buckingham, which aims to digitise the magazines in time for the bicentenary.
Researchers in these fields have questioned the hierarchy that privileges monographs over periodicals, and highlighted the
influence of form on content. Creative writing as a discipline has provided a new framework for exploration of all stages of the
writing process. And there has been growing interest in the relationship between drama and documentary, and the literary effects
used in telling true stories.
This workshop introduces examples of Dickens’s work as a journalist and considers how this behind-the-scenes work might relate
to the more public, recognised output. It asks what we can learn from the creativity of Dickens the editor, curating the literature of
the day in periodical form.
Susan Greenberg has worked for 25 years as a writer and editor for newspapers, magazines and the web. Since 2005 she has
been Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Roehampton University, and carrying out research on editing at UCL’s Department for
Information Studies. Greenberg is a founding member of the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies (IALJS).
Workshop 11 — Dickens and the kindergarten: a tale of celebrity and legitimation
The first kindergarten in England was opened at Hampstead in 1851 by Johannes and Bertha Ronge. They were a colourful
couple – he was an excommunicated Catholic Priest – and they joined the German diaspora following the failure of the revolutions
of 1848. Soon after, their kindergarten was moved to 32 Tavistock Place, nearby to Tavistock House in Tavistock Square to which
Charles Dickens moved in 1851. The proximity between the kindergarten and Dickens’s residence, together with Dickens’s interest
in childhood and schooling, fuelled the assumption that Dickens was the author of an article on the Ronges’ kindergarten that
appeared in 1855 in his journal, Household Words. However the journal’s ‘Contributors Book’ shows the article to have been
written by Henry Morley as was, it would appear, a further article on the Ronges’ kindergarten work in Dickens’s All the Year
Round published in 1859.
The contention that Dickens visited the Ronge’s kindergarten and wrote the Household Words article has been assiduously
advanced by Froebelians – including the Ronges themselves - and by several others for some time but in 1955, Dickens was
shown not to have been the article’s author. This has made little difference and current accounts still appear that misattribute the
article’s authorship.
The talk looks at why this might be. What is the power that the attribution of Dickens’s authorship could bestow on the kindergarten
movement? In order to answer this and other questions, the session will look at Froebel’s kindergarten and its implicit critique of
extant methods of schooling, Henry Morley and his relation to Dickens and finally to the affinities between Froebel’s view of
childhood and education and those of Dickens as represented in the most well known of his writings.
Prof Kevin J. Brehony is Froebel Professor of Early Childhood Studies, Director of the Early Childhood Research Centre and
Programme Convenor of the MA in Social Research Methods.
Discover Dickens
Booking
Places at the conference are £49.95 (students and jobseekers, £35) per person and this price
includes all refreshments, a buffet lunch, delegate pack, sherry and cake.
Bookings will be made online and can be paid for by credit / debit card.
To book a place on this conference, complete the following steps:
n
Follow this link: https://estore.roehampton.ac.uk
n
Click on Conference and Events
n
Click on Conferences
n
Click on Discover Dickens. This will take you to the booking page
n
Click on Book Event and follow the instructions provided
You will also be able to book your space on your chosen workshops via this link. You need to choose two
workshops one from 11.45am–1pm (workshops 1–5) and one from 3.15–4.30pm (workshops 6–11). Please
be aware that these will allocated on a first come, first serve basis.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact our Conference Officer, Julia Noyce
[email protected] or on 020 8392 3698.
If you require an audio, Braille or large text version of this publication, please contact Julia on the contact
details above. Please be aware that this will take ten working days to deliver.