Illustration from Our Mutual Friend by Marcus Stone. Wood engraving by Dalziel.
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham
Dickens had some clever little narrative tricks, which become clear when his work is analysed as a single data set.
Charles Dickens with his two daughters.
National Portrait Gallery
Charles Dickens’s attitude towards women was more complex than ‘misogynist’ label suggests.
Matt Gibson/Shutterstock
Fictional, magical cities can help us understand our own urban lives.
Highgate Cemetery.
Pack-Shot/Shutterstock
Graveyards were important locations in Victorian life.
Tennessee Witney via Shutterstock
And every one of them has a happy ending.
Dickens After Death, John Everett Millais, June 10 1870.
Charles Dickens Museum
How two ambitious men put their own interests ahead of the great writer and his family in an act of institutionally-sanctioned bodysnatching.
Image courtesy of Lionsgate
The latest version of Dickens’ classic is a refreshingly diverse tale of the triumph of the ordinary heroism over everyday evil.
Guy Pearce stars as Scrooge, the merciless creditor.
(BBC)
Modern viewers: Scrooge doesn’t discuss what he’s learned or ask for redemption. He swiftly negates the life he would have led, had it not been for the ghostly interventions.
A modern Christmas Carol.
BBC/Scott Free/FX Networks
We have an innate desire to be reminded of darkness and mortality during the festive season.
Teachers often assign older books.
vovidzha/Shutterstock.com
Stories like ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ and ‘Jane Eyre’ are still relevant today.
Ebenezer Scrooge is confronted by the apparition of his dead business partner, Jacob Marley.
John Leech/Wikipedia
Sometimes the unknown is more appealing than the truth – and it has kept ghost hunters in business for generations.
Edward Lloyd founded the first million-selling newspaper.
William Morris Gallery, Waltham Forest Council
As well as founding England’s first million-selling newspaper, Lloyd shamelessly sold plagiarised versions of some of Charles Dickens’ best-loved novels.
Publicity still for Only Fools and Horses.
www.onlyfoolsmusical.com
John Sullivan, who created Del Boy and Rodney, has been called a modern Dickens – now both their most famous works have been made into musicals.
Mr. Fezziwig’s Ball from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
Hand colored etching by John Leech
If it hadn’t been for A Christmas Carol, the menu may well have centred on goose (or a boar’s head).
Almost 1,500 immigrant boys, aged 10 to 17, were separated from their parents and brought to stay at Casa Padre in Brownsville, Texas.
Department of Health and Human Services
There are strong parallels between the Trump administration’s policy on immigrant families and the 19th century’s ‘New’ Poor Laws of England, whose cruelty was illuminated by writer Charles Dickens.
George Cruikshank’s impression of Dickens’ dystopia.
Philip V. Allingham of Victorian Web
Charles Dickens imagined a robot theme park way back in 1838.
shutterstock.
The Victorian idea of Christmas pre-dates Dickens. What the writer did was bring an essentially rural celebration into an urban setting.
The search for the ‘ideal’ Christmas song crosses a very broad range of genres and artists.
CC/The Conversation
From outright celebration, through charity to explicit political salvos – is there such a thing as the ‘ultimate’ Christmas pop song?
Perhaps the designers of the first Christmas card from 1840 were influenced by Leigh Hunt’s question: Is it right to spend, laugh and revel when there are so many people who live in isolation and poverty? John Calcott Horsely, curator and designer of the card, asked the painter, Sir Henry Cole, to show people being fed and clothed to remind his friends of the needs of the poor during this season.
Leigh Hunt is a nineteenth-century writer who grappled with the question: How can we celebrate and enjoy ourselves at this time of the year when there is so much misery in the world?
John Leech via Wikimedia Commons
The artist who illustrated A Christmas Carol was one of the best-known satirists of his time.