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Showing posts with the label Charles Dickens

The Mystery of Charles Dickens - See this play immediately if you are in the UK!

Simon Callow's Mystery of Charles Dickens is breathtakingly brilliant. He weaves exerpts from the novels into the complex rollercoaster of Dickens' life (comfort...poverty...marriage...death of his daughter...fame...love...railway crashes..) He transforms himself into Miss Haversham, Pickwick, Oliver Twist, Scrooge and carries the audience with him. The enactment of Bill Sikes' murder of Nancy is electrifying and utterly terrifying. The image of his dog being dragged out of the room will stay with me forever... "All this time he had, never once, turned his back upon the corpse; no, not for a moment. Such preparations completed, he moved, backward, towards the door: dragging the dog with him, lest he should soil his feet anew and carry out new evidence of the crime into the streets. He shut the door softly, locked it, took the key, and left the house" ( The Old Curiosity Shop , Charles Dickens, Chapter 70) Dickens is an author I loathed as a child (not unconn

What the Dickens?

When I was a child, my Grandfather had an impressive collection of Charles Dickens' novels. Bound in Morocco leather with gold lettering, we were not allowed to touch them. Naturally, the second he was out of the room, we did, and I remember the misery of being caught and not knowing what was going to happen to Little Nell in the Old Curiosity Shop. I mention this because we, at Brandon Learning Centre, have just done a series of classes based on Oliver Twist. It is incredible how fresh the human emotion is after almost 200 years and how relelvant the social commentary is to today's society. Dickens can be daunting but it is worth bearing in mind that he wrote his novels as chapters and reading each one and then pausing is an excellent way to prolong the excitement. Read the chapters outloud, preferably around a roaring fire and feel the characters come to life! "> To hear me reading an extract from Oliver Twist (simplified) "> The real thing - a wonderf