#dickens2012

Just a brief side note. I am a big Charles Dickens fan. His flare, style and colorful portrayal of humanity and of life, specifically in London, is enticing to me. Well, last year I reviewed one of my favorite Dickens book, Great Expectations, in a video. This year commemorates the 200th anniversary of his birth, 7th February 1812, hence the creation of projects celebrating this master storyteller, one in particular is the Charles Dickens Project by Xelsion Publishing. Their aim is

"to bring back the unique thrill of seeing a story take shape before your eyes, taking it one step further by combining it with the kind of revealing, honest and real-time traffic between author and reader that the instant feedback of modern social networks allows."

Well, they contacted me to write a brief article on Charles Dickens, which they will be posting shortly, and I was, of course, very much obliged and grateful. So, I'm taking this brief time and space to share this excellent project with all the readers out there that happen to stumble or follow my blog. The serialization of Great Expectations is available to download for the kindle or you can just read the chapters right from the web. Stop by the site, you might find yourself following and enjoying Great Expectaions.

Links:

David Perdue's Charles Dickens

Dickens 2012

Charles Dickens Museum

狄更斯 [dɪkənz], The Online Phenomenon, better known to his global audience as TOP

A bestselling Chinese novelist, living in Beijing, has been hailed as the new ‘Charles Dickens’ at a conference in Berlin.

TOP is spearheading e-publishing, making his writing available to emerging markets by selling novels in serial form, cheaply and in enormous volume. His e-books are adored for their enrichment with high quality audio-content, and have won him a billion Twitter and Weibo followers – even more than Stephen Fry.

He was the first to use the term ‘detective e-story’ in one of his reports about the living conditions of Chinese workers, retelling their lives in an oral storytelling tradition.

TOP has made waves among the literary elite by having all his serials immediately turned into graphic novels, making them available to children and the non-literate. He has fought many fights with his publishers who always want him to cut out digressions, but he preserves an idiosyncratic good-humoured tone as well as kitsch scenes. Editors want him to write his novels so that they can be immediately adapted for film: he fights the editors!

His writing is sometimes classified as the beginning of an entirely new genre: the Sentimental, now the fastest selling genre on Amazon.

Pursuing his three careers as writer, editor of a weekly Facebook magazine and as a sensational live performer of Cantopop, TOP has now realised his greatest dream and built a National Theatre in the Chinese capital where he both directs the big numbers and often takes the headline parts. Friends warn him regularly: ‘You might die early, because you don’t know when to stop.’

Although regarded as a pillar of the establishment, TOP remains a protester. One of his pet causes is the environment. He satirises ‘Lite-Green’ politicians mercilessly, among whom ‘Alex Crabcake’ is his most villainous creation: this slippery and smelly head of state is lampooned for his fraudulent promotion of wind farms… a load of hot air, argues TOP.

Although fans see TOP as a torchbearer for virtuous morals, his growing family (ten children+) contradicts his position on over-population.

TOP has worked hard to spread his genius-genes through IVF, spawning multiple sets of TOP triplets from donated eggs.

His most profound belief, ‘People mutht be amuthed’, is criticised by many scholars of social e-reportage who’d rather see him educating the masses about the dangers of the internet.

TOBY LITT: DICKENS IS WEIRD ON EVERY LEVEL

Toby Litt, head shining under the spotlights, sets the atmosphere for his ghost story reading by asking us to imagine the lights are off; and rouses a roar of laughter. But in defence, he argues that Dickens negated Christian values in favour of offering consolation, combining Christian martyrdom & Christmas pudding – Dickens wrote ghost stories so he could blaspheme. The message of A Christmas Carol is that you can sin for two thirds of life but it’s okay to have a change of heart; he wanted to say that it’s important that these ragged children get their share in life, that we need to deal with this now in this world.

Dickens’ core social mission was to change things through writing prose – I don’t think he would have that mission in prose today, I don’t think he would feel he was doing enough good in prose fiction. TL

DAVID NICHOLLS: DICKENS WAS AN ENTERTAINER

From the POV of a bestseller* and screenwriter** Nicholls was the only author to raise class as a defining preoccupation of Dickens. In turn, a kind of snobbery survives in interpretations of Dickens today; somehow Dickens’ entertainment value, his irrepressible humour, is still a bone of contention.

When it comes to adapting the novels, losing the narrative voice is a thorn in the side of Dickens-nuts; a screenplay just doesn’t provide for what people think. Instead, character and plot – Dickens’ iffier bits, perhaps – take precedence, and require some cleaning up by the screenwriter. The script for a film is, however, an instruction manual for the director/actors; ‘scriptwriting is not a literary form’. Whereas TV serialisation allows for baggy plots and diversions, a film has tight structural requirements (except DN recommends this outstanding and whopping 6hr version of Little Dorrit a film in two parts).

But Dickens gave the green light for adaptations after all, bowdlerising stories for dramatic effect at his own public readings.

*Yes, One Day had the highest sales at the seminar, ahead of Claire Tomalin’s Dickens: A Life.

PHILIP HENSHER’S SESH

#city #gesture #empire #absence

Friday morning; breakfasted; second breakfasted. Hensher's reading from Our Mutual Friend focussed on Bella Wilfer’s relationship with her father, a tender moment, not that it led to debate about the strengths/weaknesses of relationships elsewhere in Dickens’ novels. Instead, the sticking point turned out to be Reginald Wilfer’s sticky-up hair – and all those many male characters that Dickens made suffer from sticky-up hair...

One of the interesting things is he’s writing for the first time in a huge city where you can’t know everyone, so he’s observing the external signs by which you know people, and this is a new thing, as opposed to Jane Austen. In the vast city of Dickens we are suddenly in a world where we have to judge the externals. PH

Hensher read from his new book, with an ‘oriental’ setting, and so it followed that ‘the absence of empire’ in Dickens’ novels should be observed.

Let’s tick Dickens off; he should have been more interested in the empire than Mrs Jellyby… I would have loved dickens to have written a novel that had something to say about India. In unexpected moments his mind just shuts off. PH

The audience refers to Dickens’ response to the Indian mutiny – he expressed a complete lack of sympathy with the protesters; although perhaps because his son was there at the time. The audience suggests that this abscence was down to his lack of confidence in tackling the unknown – Dickens wrote about what he knew – although there are specks of reference: Herbert going off diligently to India in Great Expectations; the Landlesses from Egypt and opium dens in Edwin Drood. Hensher wonders, were Dickens to have had another five years of writing, would he have moved further into Africa? John Mullan’s return is sanguine: ‘perhaps it’s a relief that he didn’t write embarrassing passages? After the railway crash, that did something permanent to Dickens; he lost something.’