Video: ‘Celebrating Dickens’

In this short snippet, Prof. Jon Mee from the University of Warwick talks about the Celebrating Dickens Project that he and his colleagues have been working on, which includes a mobile phone app, a series of podcasts and a 45 minute documentary.

Introduction – Prof. Regenia Gagnier

I’m Regenia Gagnier, Professor of English at the University of Exeter and Editor in Chief of  Literature Compass and the Global Circulation Project (GCP).  The GCP traces the circulation of authors, books, literary movements and genres around the world, specializing in moments of cultural translation. For the month of February I have been participating in the launch of the Bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens, what we call Dickens 2012. Literature Compass and the GCP have joined the British Council,  Dickens House Museum, and Dickens Fellowship in events held at the Museum of London, Westminster Abbey, and Buckingham Palace in celebration  of the novelist and his works.

Dickens has historically been the most popular British creative writer after Shakespeare, both a national and international figure. Writers from Dostoevsky, Galdós, Joyce, Kafka, Faulkner, Nabokov, and Beckett to Kumar, Naipaul, Ngugi, Soyinka, Dabydeen, Carey, and Rushdie have written of the impact of Dickens on their own creative practice. Abroad, Dickens has represented the “English Book,” the panoramic style, depictions of the masses, of the urban and London, of the suffering of children. He has inspired critics of poverty and injustice; and film auteurs from Eisenstein, Griffith, and Chaplin to Lean, Polanski, Greene and Burstall have adapted his novels according to their own cultural moments and locations. Dickens was translated into Russian as early as the 1830s and was the most read British author in China from his first translation in the 1890s to the Cultural Revolution, studied and discussed  by the Late Qing, Nationalists, and Communists alike. (The first complete edition of Dickens’s novels in Chinese will be out in time for the London Book Fair this spring, which will focus on the PRC.)  In 1911 the Melbourne Branch of the Dickens Fellowship debated whether he was an important influence on Australian democracy. In Latin America, a literature on the street children grew up after Dickens in Argentina and Brazil. In the 1970s students in the townships in South Africa read and performed Dickens and demanded more.

Dickens by Stephanie Tanzil. Image used with permission.

We have celebrated Dickens 2012 with a Tale of Four Cities travelling conference between Paris, Boulogne and Condette, Chatham and Rochester, and London, all cities significant in the life of Dickens. In London, the theme at the Museum of London  was “Global Dickens.” The British Council sent out invitations to a Global Readathon: 24 hours reading from 24 Dickens’s works in 24 different countries.  66 countries responded, with 3 million hits from China alone.  The British Council also asked schools world-wide to consider “What would Dickens write today?,” and “Where would he be writing from?” They received the most wonderful short works from pupils and students throughout the world.

If you want to read more work on Global Dickens, look at the GCP and at many more articles just on Dickens at Literature Compass.