Dickens on the BBC | Dickens 2012
Celebrating the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens
Accidents will occur in the best regulated families
No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another
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UK and International
November 2011 - February 2012
November 2011 - February 2012
From 28 November to February 2012, the BBC will celebrate the work of one of Britain’s greatest writers with Dickens on the BBC, a season of documentary, drama and discussion programmes across television and radio. From a bold new three-part adaptation of Great Expectations for BBC One to the completion of Dickens’ unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood by writer Gwyneth Hughes on BBC Two and Life-long Dickens fan Armando Iannucci reviewing the development of a revolutionary master story-teller.
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Movies
Great Expectations trailer: Harry Potter director revives Dickens tale
Published Tuesday, Sep 18 2012, 12:28 BST | By Simon Reynolds |7 comments
The 2-minute 21-second preview teases Harry Potter director Mike Newell's fresh take on Charles Dickens's classic story.
Great Expectations stars War Horse actor Jeremy Irvine as Pip, with Helena Bonham Carter as Miss Havisham, Ralph Fiennes as Magwitch and The Borgias star Holliday Grainger as Estella.
The supporting cast also features Sally Hawkins, Robbie Coltrane and Jason Flemyng. One Day screenwriter David Nichols wrote the script for the film.
Great Expectations will close the BFI London Film Festival in October
《遠大前程》引目光
英國著名女演員海蓮娜•B•卡特（Helena Bonham Carter）承認，一開始有點猶豫接演新版《遠大前程》中哈維辛小姐（Miss Havisham）這一角色。
「我的第一反應是，「我有那麼老嗎？」」，卡特在首映式上說。
新版《遠大前程》在英國將於11月30日放映，影片聚集眾大腕。拉爾夫•費恩斯（Ralph Fiennes）扮演罪犯麥格維奇（Magwitch），羅比•考特拉尼（Robbie Coltrane）扮演賈格斯先生（Mr Jaggers），因《戰馬》（War Horse）而走紅的傑裏米•艾文（Jeremy Irvine）則出演主角皮普（Pip）。
導演則是曾執導《四個婚禮一個葬禮》（Four Weddings And A Funeral）的邁克•內維爾（Mike Newell ），暢銷小說《一日》（One Day）作家大衛•尼古拉斯（David Nichols）擔任本片編劇。
卡特表示，導演一再勸說她是哈維辛小姐的理想扮演者，她才接受出演。「他說如果我去算算年齡，哈維辛小姐才56歲，而我是45歲。而且他說，哈維辛小姐的年齡變化是從27歲到56歲。」
卡特後來表示，哈維辛小姐「絕對是我喜歡的」。
海蓮娜•B•卡特在電影中飾演身著布滿蜘蛛絲婚紗的哈維辛小姐（Miss Havisham）。
倫敦電影節的新導演克萊爾•斯圖爾特（Clare Stewart）說：「整個電影是慶祝狄更斯誕辰200年紀念活動，所以作為電影節閉幕電影還挺合適的。」
卡特和她伴侶，導演蒂姆•波頓（Tim Burton）被授予了電影節的最高榮譽獎（BFI Fellowship）。
Being Charles Dickens
By DAVID GATES
Published: November 3, 2011
Robert DOUGLAS-FAIRHURST, the Oxford scholar who is one of Charles Dickens’s two new biographers, rightly calls his subject “at once the most central and most eccentric literary figure” of his age, and the investigations into the dark corners of that eccentric life began with Dickens himself. In 1849 he showed a short account of his early years to his close friend John Forster, revealing a story he never told his own family: the shame-inducing months he spent, while his father was in a debtor’s prison, as a 12-year-old “laboring hind” in a factory that bottled shoe-blacking. The first volume of the biography he’d wanted Forster to write — which made the blacking-factory episode public — appeared in 1872, two years after Dickens died at the age of 58, and its successors keep coming. The Dickens biographies published just in the past 25 years make an impressive stack. Given his uncanny genius and the vivid complexity of his life, that’s not a complaint.
Image from the Bodleian Library, Oxford University
An etching of Charles Dickens from The Court Magazine and Monthly Critic, in 1837.
CHARLES DICKENS
A Life
By Claire Tomalin
Illustrated. 527 pp. The Penguin Press. $36
BECOMING DICKENS
The Invention of a Novelist
By Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
Illustrated. 389 pp. The Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. $29.95
Claire Tomalin, the other new biographer, who quotes this confession in “Charles Dickens: A Life,” calls it “amazing” — though it’s only amazing because it’s the image-conscious Dickens himself coming out and saying what anybody familiar with his work and his life has always intuited. “It is as though with Dostoyevsky he could drop the appearance of perfect virtue he felt he had to keep up before the English public.”
As Tomalin notes, this “must be Dickens’s most profound statement about his inner life,” and it seems to be one of the few crucial bits of Dickensiana that’s relatively fresh. Both Tomalin and Michael Slater, who cites the same passage in his 2009 biography, “Charles Dickens,” found the newly translated Dostoyevsky letter in a 2002 article in The Dickensian. Neither Fred Kaplan (“Dickens: A Biography,” 1988) nor Peter Ackroyd (“Dickens,” 1991) seems to have known about it. Mostly, the recent biographies are remixes of familiar episodes and anecdotes; their interest lies largely in what’s included and what’s left out, how deeply the biographer goes into unpublished or unfamiliar work, and what’s adduced from further research into the world in which Dickens lived and worked.
Neither Tomalin nor Douglas-Fairhurst, in “Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist,” sees fit to show us Dickens dancing the hornpipe in his sailor suit, though Ackroyd and Slater apparently found it a charming, perhaps significant, glimpse of the young man at play. And how could Tomalin have resisted the story of Dickens’s first love, Maria Beadnell (affectionately evoked as Dora in “David Copperfield,” then cruelly caricatured as Flora Finching in “Little Dorrit”), near the end of her life, drunkenly kissing the place on her couch where he’d once sat? Maria’s former nursemaid published the account in 1912; Douglas-Fairhurst retells it, and while Slater didn’t include it in his biography, he’d already used it in an earlier book, “Dickens and Women.” Yet only an obsessive would worry too much about which anecdote didn’t make whose cut: an ideal life of Dickens would just stick in everything, and probably no publisher would touch it.
After Tomalin’s much-praised biographies of Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy and Samuel Pepys, it’s no surprise to find her portrait of Dickens at least as thorough as Kaplan’s or Slater’s, though she gives us no introduction explaining why previous biographies have made hers necessary, and sometimes teases us with flat summary where we want meat. (If, for instance, “the critics were merciless” about his 1846 Christmas book, “The Battle of Life,” why not quote them?) Her book lacks the rich texture and empathetic intimacy of Ackroyd’s far longer work. On the other hand, Tomalin would never indulge in zaniness like Ackroyd’s interpolated self-interview or his scene in which Dickens meets his own characters or the imagined encounter between Dickens and a biographer, presumably Ackroyd himself. And Tomalin’s treatment of the great secret of Dickens’s life — his relationship with the actress Ellen Ternan, for whom he left his marriage in 1858, when he was 46 and she was 19 — seems more credible, even when it’s necessarily speculative. In 1990 she devoted an entire book, “The Invisible Woman,” to exploring this secret — whose existence Dickensians have known about at least since the 1930s.
Despite Dickens’s discreet, intermittent cohabitation with Ternan, Ackroyd found it “almost inconceivable” that the two actually went to bed together: he argued that their idyll was merely “the realization of one of his most enduring fictional fantasies. That of sexless marriage with a young, idealized virgin.” Few other scholars agree — not even Edgar Johnson, whose two-volume “Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph,” published in 1952, was the first major modern biography. As Tomalin notes, Dickens was a sexual creature: he fathered 10 children with his wife, and after they separated he apparently sought treatment for a venereal infection. Had he been such a prude as his fiction and his public persona sometimes suggested — after news of his separation got around, Forster had to talk him out of calling a new start-up magazine Household Harmony — he would hardly have remained close friends with sophisticated sexual outlaws like the artists Frank Stone and Daniel Maclise, the novelist Wilkie Collins and the Count d’Orsay, the French dandy whom he made godfather to his son Alfred. Hearsay and circumstantial evidence even suggest that Ternan might have borne Dickens a son, who died within a year.
We can only guess about certain aspects of Dickens’s relationship with Ternan, but Tomalin does build a convincing case. She’s less convincing when she suggests that Dickens’s fatal stroke might have happened while he was off with Ternan, and that he might have been sneaked back into his own house, unconscious, to be officially discovered. This reads like some of the wilder theories about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but, to Tomalin’s credit, she doesn’t insist on it.
Douglas-Fairhurst’s “Becoming Dickens” takes us only through 1839 and the completion of “Oliver Twist,” Dickens’s second novel — and the first whose title page he dignified with his own name rather than “Boz,” the cockney-ish alias under which he first became popular with “Sketches by Boz” and “The Pickwick Papers.” Douglas-Fairhurst’s is a far more lively and detailed book — a more Dickensian book — than Tomalin’s, though not always to its advantage. When his painstaking research combines with an overactive fancy, we get such passages as this description of Dickens taking a curtain call after his now-forgotten 1836 operetta “The Village Coquettes”: “The curtains of St. James’s Theatre were green” — how did he find that out? — “as were the covers of ‘Pickwick,’ so in coming onstage Dickens would have looked strangely like the author himself emerging from his writing.”
Yet more often Douglas-Fairhurst serves as a sharp-eyed, sharp-witted, yet sympathetic tour guide to the young Dickens’s strange world and equally strange sensibility. He performs deft deconstructions of such arcana as a labored comic poem to Maria Beadnell: “Telling a new girlfriend what you would feel like if she were dead is certainly an unusual seduction technique.” He discusses the trash Dickens read as a boy (from “The Terrific Register” to a comic miscellany called “Broad Grins”), a probable inspiration for Oliver Twist’s benefactor Mr. Brownlow (a man of the same name was secretary of the Foundling Hospital “a few hundred yards from Dickens’s home”) and a precursor of the rapid-fire tale-spinning of Jingle in “Pickwick” (the monologues of the comedian Charles Mathews, “Dickens’s favorite solo performer”). His research extends to the pirates and imitators who ripped off Dickens’s early work — including one G. M. W. Reynolds, whose “Pickwick in India” “abruptly ceased publication after seven chapters when the author . . . wrote himself into a corner with a gloating description of Mr. Pickwick being devoured by a shark.” And it’s Douglas-Fairhurst, not the sober-sided Tomalin, who sees the humor in this icky irrelevancy: Dickens’s publisher had wanted to give his first book the Elmer Fuddian title “Bubbles From the Bwain of Boz.”
In fairness to Tomalin, the story she’s obliged to tell of her subject’s later life would temper anybody’s sense of fun. The leaping, hornpiping young man aged badly. In his 50s he often hobbled around with a gouty foot, and sometimes had to be helped onstage during the obsessive and exhausting reading tours that may have hastened his death — a malign redirecting of the manic energy that had once enabled him to work on two serialized novels simultaneously while also editing a monthly magazine. Twenty-eight times between January 1869 and March 1870, Dickens performed the horrifying episode in “Oliver Twist” in which Bill Sikes murders the prostitute Nancy. After it, Dickens had to lie down, unable to speak; when his manager tried to get him to do quieter readings, he threw a tantrum and burst into tears.
Tomalin accurately describes Dickens’s treatment of the abandoned Catherine as shameful: he went so far as to publish a letter accusing her of “a mental disorder,” and he wrote to a friend that she was glad to be rid of their children, “and they are glad to be rid of her.” His daughter Katey recalled that after the separation, “my father was like a madman. . . . He did not care a damn what happened to any of us.”
Dickens had a premonitory stroke in 1869, and at his final public reading, in March 1870, he was unable to pronounce the name “Pickwick.” On June 8, he had another stroke, and the next day the unconscious Dickens “gave a sigh, a tear appeared in his right eye and ran down his cheek, and he stopped breathing.” That tear was the last of Dickens’s many gifts to his biographers — of all the recent retellings of the death scene, only Michael Slater’s version omits it — and here’s hoping we’ll see it again and again and again until the ideal, the impossible life is written at last.
David Gates’s most recent book is “The Wonders of the Invisible World,” a collection of stories.
In the week of the bicentenary of Charles Dickens' birth (7th February 1812), I thought it would be nice to include a phrase coined by him. It ought not to be too difficult to find one, after all, Dickens ranks sixth on the 'number of English words coined by an individual author' list. Passing over contenders like 'slow-coach' and 'cloak and dagger' I alighted on 'butterfingers', which several authorities say was invented by Dickens. Not quite a phrase but, as it was coined as the hyphenated 'butter-fingers', it's close enough. Dickens used the term in The Pickwick Papers (more properly calledThe Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club), 1836:
Many of the later examples of 'butterfingers' in print relate to the game of cricket, which was and still is the principal ball-catching game in England. The term is often used as an amiable taunt when someone fails to make an easy catch. As the word spread to other countries, notably America, it was taken into the language of the local catching game, i.e. baseball, and 'no-hoper' teams were unkindly given that name. The Salt Lake Tribune reported on such a team in May 1899:
Daily chart
What the Dickens
Feb 7th 2012, 15:39 by The Economist online
Sales of Charles Dickens's books in his lifetime
ON THE death of Charles Dickens in 1870 the Times lamented, “The loss of such a man is an event which makes ordinary expressions of regret seem cold and conventional”. It was the prodigious popularity of his work that went furthest to explaining the effect his death had on book-reading Britain and beyond. To mark today's 200th anniversary of his birth, we have tried to discover which novel sold best during Dickens's life. The answer, below, comes with bigger caveats than most items on this blog. They do not include the sales of novels in instalments. The numbers date from 1846, by which time “Pickwick Papers”, Dickens’s first novel, was already ten years old. And owing to the vagaries of 19th-century record-keeping, the sales of different books were sometimes grouped together under a single heading, “cheap editions”, and so cannot be split into their constituent titles. For those last two reasons, the figures for Dickens’s earlier novels may be under-counted. But we believe these are the best numbers available. For 465 pages of detailed explanation, consult Robert Patten’s 1978 tome, “Charles Dickens and his Publishers”, from which we derived our figures.
ON THE death of Charles Dickens in 1870 the Times lamented, “The loss of such a man is an event which makes ordinary expressions of regret seem cold and conventional”. It was the prodigious popularity of his work that went furthest to explaining the effect his death had on book-reading Britain and beyond. To mark today's 200th anniversary of his birth, we have tried to discover which novel sold best during Dickens's life. The answer, below, comes with bigger caveats than most items on this blog. They do not include the sales of novels in instalments. The numbers date from 1846, by which time “Pickwick Papers”, Dickens’s first novel, was already ten years old. And owing to the vagaries of 19th-century record-keeping, the sales of different books were sometimes grouped together under a single heading, “cheap editions”, and so cannot be split into their constituent titles. For those last two reasons, the figures for Dickens’s earlier novels may be under-counted. But we believe these are the best numbers available. For 465 pages of detailed explanation, consult Robert Patten’s 1978 tome, “Charles Dickens and his Publishers”, from which we derived our figures.
Butterfingers
Meaning
A name playfully applied to someone who fails to catch a ball or lets something slip from their fingers.Origin
In the week of the bicentenary of Charles Dickens' birth (7th February 1812), I thought it would be nice to include a phrase coined by him. It ought not to be too difficult to find one, after all, Dickens ranks sixth on the 'number of English words coined by an individual author' list. Passing over contenders like 'slow-coach' and 'cloak and dagger' I alighted on 'butterfingers', which several authorities say was invented by Dickens. Not quite a phrase but, as it was coined as the hyphenated 'butter-fingers', it's close enough. Dickens used the term in The Pickwick Papers (more properly calledThe Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club), 1836:At every bad attempt at a catch, and every failure to stop the ball, he launched his personal displeasure at the head of the devoted individual in such denunciations as 'Ah, ah! - stupid' - 'Now, butter-fingers' - 'Muff' - 'Humbug' - and so forth.It seemed as though that was all there was to say about the word/phrase but, as I usually like to add a little more, I delved further. The British Library's excellent new database of 19th century newspapers turned up a reference to 'butter-fingers' in the Yorkshire newspaperThe Leeds Intelligencer dated May 1823. Pre-Pickwick, clearly. Looking closer, it appeared that the writer was quoting from what he called 'a scarce book' - The English Housewife. Delving again, I found that the book, written by the English writer Gervase Markham in 1615, scarce as it may have been in 1823, is still available today. Markham's recipe for a good housewife was:
'First, she must be cleanly in body and garments; she must have a quick eye, a curious nose, a perfect taste, and ready ear; she must not be butter-fingered, sweet-toothed, nor faint-hearted - for the first will let everything fall; the second will consume what it should increase; and the last will lose time with too much niceness.Markham's views aren't quite what would be accepted now, any more than his remedy for the plague - 'smell a nosegay made of the tasselled end of a ship rope', but he does at least make it clear that 'butterfingers' was in use in 1615 with the same meaning we have for it today, that is, someone likely to drop things - as if their hands were smeared with butter, like a cook's.
Many of the later examples of 'butterfingers' in print relate to the game of cricket, which was and still is the principal ball-catching game in England. The term is often used as an amiable taunt when someone fails to make an easy catch. As the word spread to other countries, notably America, it was taken into the language of the local catching game, i.e. baseball, and 'no-hoper' teams were unkindly given that name. The Salt Lake Tribune reported on such a team in May 1899:
'The Butterfingers will cross bats with the Salt Lake Juniors at Calder's Park Tuesday'.As for Dickens, he may have missed out on 'butterfingers' but he has many other words and phrases to lay claim to, and he did write some exceedingly good books.
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