Tag: Dickens

This weekend I’ll be delivering my first public lecture, at the Orlando Public Library. I’m participating in their “What the Dickens” event, a year-long celebration of Charles Dickens. The timing is apt: I just returned from Dickens Universe, a yearly event in Santa Cruz for both scholars and the public. And right before that I

Not to be snobbish or melodramatic, but without Dickens many common words might have been confined to the dustbins of history. He might induce boredom in junior high students, but his career, spectacularly narratable and the subject of numerous biographies, brought a number of words from the messiness of orality into the messiness of print.