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mae
02-07-2012, 11:57 AM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/07/dickens-200th-birthday-celebrated

A 24-hour global "readathon", celebrations in two British cities and a special Google Doodle were among the highlights of the bicentenary of Charles Dickens's birth on Tuesday.

For the readathon, organised by the British Council, 24 countries hosted consecutive readings of Dickens novels. Starting in Australia with an extract from Dombey and Son, it was due to hit the UK at 9pm, where the author David Nicholls was planning to read from Great Expectations at the British Film Institute.

In Portsmouth, where Dickens was born, a day that actor Simon Callow warned would be "a dangerously moving occasion" started with the laying of a wreath outside the author's birthplace by Ian Dickens, his great great grandson, then continued with a service at St Mary's church which included readings by Callow and Sheila Hancock from David Copperfield and Oliver Twist.

In London, festivities began at his old house in Doughty Street, now the Dickens Museum, where Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall were treated to a private reading of his work by Gillian Anderson, who played Miss Havisham in a BBC adaptation of Great Expectations.

The house, where Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby were written, recently raised eyebrows by announcing that it would close for a £3.1m refurbishment from April, despite the potential boost in visitors that Dickens's bicentenary and the Olympics would be expected to bring.

The royals then moved on to Westminster Abbey for a wreath-laying ceremony on Dickens's grave in Poet's Corner, attended by Dickens fellows, society members and almost 200 of his descendents – as well as famous enthusiasts of his work including Nicholls, Armando Iannucci and Mike Newell.

Ralph Fiennes, who is to star as Magwitch in a new film adaptation of Great Expectations, proved Dickens's ability to stir the emotions with a heart-rending extract from Bleak House describing the death of homeless boy Jo.

In a statement, read out simultaneously in Portsmouth, Prince Charles said: "Despite the many years that have passed, Charles Dickens remains one of the greatest writers of the English language, who used his creative genius to campaign passionately for social justice. The word Dickensian instantly conjures up a vivid picture of Victorian life with all its contrasts and intrigue, and his characterisation is as fresh today as it was on the day it was written."

Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, said Dickens loved the poor through "a sense of outrage that lives are being made flat and dark". He said he regarded Bleak House as Dickens's "most profoundly theological work, though he would not thank me for that".

"I didn't realise the service would be so religious," said academic and Dickens fan Berry Mayall afterwards. "Dickens had faith in God but he was a Unitarian – he didn't have much truck with the Church of England. He liked his religion plain. But I thought they chose the readings very well indeed."

Jane Whinney, the wife of Dickens's great great great great grandson Harry Whinney, said she planned to continued the celebrations at a dinner in Dickens's honour at Mansion House, with entertainment by Patrick Stewart.

The novelist Carol Lee said the service had reaffirmed the potency of Dickens's work. She said she sat next to a man from New York at the service who said Dickens had changed his life. "In 1993 he was reading A Tale of Two Cities and came to the chapter where the man is sitting drunk: 'Here is a man who has sensibilities but cannot be sensible.' It was as if Dickens was speaking to him directly and he stopped then and there."


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-16896661

Leading Charles Dickens biographer Claire Tomalin has said children are not being taught to read with the attention span necessary to appreciate the novelist's works.

Tomalin said Dickens's depiction of an unequal society was still "amazingly relevant", ahead of nationwide celebrations to mark the 200th anniversary of his birth.

Children were now unable to appreciate this due to "being reared on dreadful television programmes", she said in an interview with the Press Association.

"Children are not being educated to have prolonged attention spans and you have to be prepared to read steadily for a Dickens novel and I think that's a pity."

On Tuesday, events will take place around the UK to celebrate Dickens's bi-centenary.

They include a street party in Portsmouth, Hampshire, where the novelist was born.

There will be a wreath-laying ceremony at his grave in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, London, attended by the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall and celebrities including Ralph Fiennes.

A Global Dickens Read-a-thon will also take place in 24 countries from Albania to Zimbabwe, beginning in Australia with a reading from Dombey and Son.

Tomalin, who will also attend the Westminster Abbey event, said Dickens was "after Shakespeare, the greatest creator of characters in English.

"He has gone on entertaining people since the 1830s and his characters' names are known all over the world.

"And because of the way he wrote, he adapts very well for theatre and even people who do not read him know about him from films, the TV and musicals.

"You only have to look around our society and everything he wrote about in the 1840s is still relevant - the great gulf between the rich and poor, corrupt financiers, corrupt MPs, how the country is run by old Etonians, you name it, he said it."

Tomalin added that the character in modern culture most like one created by Dickens was Basil Fawlty.

"The whole two series of Fawlty Towers stand up, they are so funny and Basil Fawlty, he is a Dickensian monster."

Tomalin's Charles Dickens: A Life has been widely acclaimed by literary critics and was shortlisted for 2011's Costa Book Awards biography prize.

She has also chronicled the lives of Samuel Pepys, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy.

http://entertainment.time.com/2012/02/07/counting-down-dickens-greatest-novels-number-1-bleak-house/

In the middle of Bleak House, the heroine, an orphan named Esther Summerson, gets smallpox and goes blind. The first time I read the novel I was so shocked and upset by this turn of events that I wrote about it in my journal as if it had happened in real life, to someone I knew.

Bleak House is Dickens’ grandest, most virtuosic achievement, but with all that grandeur and virtuosity it still makes me cry for Esther Summerson. The novel is divided into two strands: the story of rich, haughty, reserved Lady Dedlock, told by an omniscient narrator, and Esther’s story, told in her own words. They are connected, as is everything in Bleak House, by the court case Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a tangle of disputed wills and disrupted inheritance that has tied up the High Court of Chancery for decades, suspending the lives of its legatees and incurring costs of 60,000 to 70,000 pounds. When the lawyers of Chancery speak in glowing terms of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which they are wont to do, as a “monument of Chancery practice,” they speak of its interminable procedures, its unending piles of paperwork. They call it “the cause,” but there is no effect. They never speak of justice.

With his dual narrative structure, Dickens stands above his action and within it. In no other novel is his ventriloquism so cleverly on display. At Chancery and with the Dedlocks, he lays on the pomp and circumstance as if taking the English language and gold-plating it. This is the Dedlocks’ country estate of Chesney Wold left empty, when the couple has gone to town:

Chesney Wold is shut up, carpets are rolled into great scrolls in corners of comfortless rooms, bright damask does penance in brown Holland, carving and gilding puts on mortification, and the Dedlock ancestors retire from the light of day again. Around and around the house the leaves fall thick, but never fast, for they come circling down with a dead lightness that is somber and slow. Let the gardener sweep and sweep the turf as he will, and press the leaves into full barrows, and wheel them off, still they lie ankle-deep. Howls the shrill wind round Chesney Wold; the sharp rain beats, the windows rattle, and the chimneys growl. Mists hide in the avenues, veil the points of view, and move in funeral-wise across the rising grounds.

The present tense, used throughout this strand of the novel, signals continuity but also oppressive stagnation. The rich, round vowels are full of money. It’s hard to read these sentences aloud; they almost choke the throat.

Esther, on the other hand, speaks as you would expect a young woman to speak who is humble, with no lofty connections, raised by a “grave and strict” godmother.

I had never heard my mama spoken of. I had never heard of my papa either, but I felt more interested about my mama. I had never worn a black frock, that I could recollect. I had never been shown my mama’s grave. I had never been told where it was.

Singled out by a mysterious benefactor (but not Abel Magwitch) she leaves her godmother for boarding school, and her school for the Chancery court, where she is appointed companion to a young woman named Ada Clare, one of the wards in Jarndyce. With Ada’s cousin Richard Carstone, another ward, they move into the home of Ada’s and Richard’s relation John Jarndyce, a genial man just a bit past his prime, who would be a party to the suit had he not renounced it years ago as an ill wind that blew no one with his surname good. His home is called Bleak House, but the only bleak thing about it is the distant shadow of Chancery.

Esther may speak simply, but she is not always direct. A modest girl, she is coy about compliments, protesting too much when Ada, Richard, John Jarndyce and pretty much everyone else they meet praise her. She can be a little cloying in her emotional attachments to the same. But every time I reread Bleak House, I dwell more and more on Esther’s tempered toughness. Not for nothing did she withstand a friendless childhood, one in which she was repeatedly decried as her unknown mother’s disgrace. As Richard becomes embroiled in the lawsuit and estranged from his cousin John, Esther balances her affection for him with her disappointment, and lets him see both sentiments clearly. When John Jarndyce’s irresponsible friend Harold Skimpole takes advantage of the household’s generosity it is Esther who exposes him as a fraud. As for William Guppy, the unctuous legal clerk who falls for her charms, she remains heroically firm in the face of his unexpected proposal.

Mr. Guppy went down on his knees. I was well behind my table and not much frightened. I said, ‘Get up from that ridiculous position now, sir, or you will oblige me to break my implied promise and ring the bell!’

He gets up. Wouldn’t you?

In the introduction to my Penguin edition of Bleak House, J. Hillis Miller, one of the first serious Dickens scholars in America, advises readers to look out for the number of significant deaths in the novel. “I count nine,” he writes, and sometimes, if I’m stuck in line or on the subway with nothing to entertain me, I try in my head to count the nine. To say that Dickens writes as if for television is more than just to acknowledge his serial composition, it’s also — in the wake of shows like The Sopranos — to suggest that he populates his fictional world richly enough to dispense with a critical mass of its key inhabitants and still keep his story going strong. Even within Dickens’ oeuvre, the only other work that could possibly sustain such a quantity of mortal blows is Our Mutual Friend, and that’s a book where too many people spend too much time near a river. If nine memorable characters die in Bleak House (one of them, most memorably, of spontaneous combustion), imagine how many survive. That gives you a sense of the novel’s scope.

Because he worked closely with illustrators, Dickens had to plan his plots sufficiently in advance to give the artist lead-time in which to draw. From Dombey and Son on, his early notes for each novel survive, and the notes for Bleak House provide a master class in complex plotting. The story involves the unraveling of numerous mysteries — beginning with: who is the law writer who calls himself Nemo, and why does Lady Dedlock care to find out? — which meant the author needed to establish evidence and motive and plant clues along the way. Here are a few of the victims, conspirators and witnesses, in shorthand. Mr. Krook, proprietor of a rag and bone shop full of old documents: “Introduce the old marine store Dealer who has the papers.” The Dedlocks’ mighty lawyer, whose eye nothing escapes: “Mr. Tulkinghorn and Lady Dedlock. Each watching the other.” The crossing-sweep boy, always on the move: “Jo — shadowing forth of Lady Dedlock in the churchyard.” The mad old woman who haunts the courts: “Miss Flite and her birds.” She keeps the birds caged and names two after the wards in Jarndyce. On the day of judgment, she says, she’ll set them free.

Esther regains her sight. But she suffers in other ways that both pull one’s heartstrings and serve the story. There’s little in Bleak House, the most efficient 900-page novel you’ll ever read, that doesn’t do one or the other, or both. When I think about its merits I always remember a rather plain line at the end, spoken by John Jarndyce to Esther (if you’ve read the book, you’ll know what it means): “My dearest, Allan Woodcourt stood beside your father when he lay dead — stood beside your mother.” I love Bleak House because the entire plot coalesces in that one sentence and transforms into poetry. You wouldn’t think it possible if you hadn’t watched it happen, chapter by chapter, word by word. Dickens isn’t interested simply in making connections. He wants the connections to matter. To my mind, they never matter more than in Bleak House.

And so, dear reader, you have come to the end of our Blogging the Dickens project. We hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as we have. Please feel free to leave your thoughts about Bleak House, or any of Dickens’ novels, in the comments section below.

blavigne
02-07-2012, 04:39 PM
Happy Birthday Charles. Very fond to my heart, my first real novel, David Copperfield, a paperback version that I read until it fell apart. Thank you.

Merlin1958
02-07-2012, 06:31 PM
Thanks for the legacy, Mr. Dickens!!!!

Jean
02-07-2012, 11:23 PM
happy birthday to my favorite author ever!!!

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