Dickens’ Birthday

[callmemadam]

I chose the geranium icon today because red geraniums were Dickens’ favourite flowers.

Even Google has gone Dickensian for the occasion.

Find out what’s happening at Dickens 2012.

The Telegraph has a special Charles Dickens page. Ironic that there will be a wreath laying ceremony in Westminster Abbey today, when Dickens specifically requested that he be buried without pomp.

Spitalfields Life has some wonderful pictures this morning of Park Cottage, where Ellen Ternan lived with her mother and sisters.

Read a book. The Book People have some great offers on Dickens’ novels.



Dickens' birthplace in Portsmouth, the house with the plaque.

Comments

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

Guardian 'fiendish' Dickens quiz:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/07/charles-dickens-200-birthday-quiz

(Even I got some and I've only read A Christmas Carol and half of Pickwick Papers!)

[gwendraith.livejournal.com]

I saw the Google header :) It's a very exciting day and I maybe should read a little Dickens. I'm particularly fond of him because he has been instrumental in helping with my ancestry. To do research for his books he walked the actual streets of Bermondsey day and at night with early policemen where two of my Thames watermen great grandfathers and families lived (at the time they lived there) and wrote about the horror of the slums and the failings of the system. It gave me such an insight into their lives and the reality of how they lived. Of course he could do little or nothing about social reform in his day but I do believe he cared about the poor and their plight and his words live on to tell that tale. Who knows, maybe my family saw him in the streets :)

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

Oh you time waster! What makes it so fiendish actually tells you a lot about Dickens. Some of the characters are so vividly described, yet so peripheral to the plot, that you can't remember which book they're in.

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

He did a lot of good works and raised huge sums of money for various charities.

Meeting Dickens in the street, gosh. What would you say?

[oddny.livejournal.com]

Difficult to imagine: meeting ones heroes usually leaves one tongue tied as I discovered recently:-)
I'm re-reading David Copperfield and loving it which is odd because I didn't enjoy Dickens at all when I was younger
" -and then fighting all the way she felt herself sucked in" (rather like Miss N. Marlow!)

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

Hee! I'm glad you're now enjoying Dickens and I hope lots of other people are, too. I certainly wouldn't know what to say to Dickens. Or Bob Dylan.

[lethe1]

I wouldn't mind living in the white (cream?) house next to it, very nice!

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

Indeed! I think it's all much smarter now, and more expensive (comparatively) than when the Dickens family lived there.