Dickens apps, maps and more

This week I’ve been finishing an essay on Dickens 2012 and ‘locating the Victorians in the bicentenary year’; although I’ve written and spoken about this work quite a few times now (including an essay in this forthcoming book), this piece has given me the opportunity to focus on more detailed analysis of content included in Dickens apps, maps, podcasts and films. It’s led me to discover some great resources on the theme of Dickens and London, so I thought I’d collect these together into a blog post with a brief review of each.

Apps and audio podcasts

• The Guardian audio walks; this five-part series of walks around Dickens’s London, Rochester and Portsmouth by The Guardian are excellent: informative, engaging, and lively discussion, interspersed with readings from the text. In 2012 I tried out two of the walks – The Heart of the City and David Copperfield – and wrote about them for JVC Online.
• Dickens in Southwark; I haven’t had the chance to do these walks myself, but I’ve been greatly impressed just using the app and listening to the audio of this walk. The core content is lively and informative, while there is extra audio on the map that was developed from a creative project involving Southwark residents. The app is easily navigable, has a well-functioning map, and with a total of 25 ‘stops’ there is lots of content to explore.
• Dickens Trail, Charles Dickens Museum; this app uses Dickens’s characters as a guide to his London locations, with four themed walks following Magwitch, Lady Dedlock, the Artful Dodger, and Samuel Pickwick. The real shame of this app is that there is no audio content, only text on a map, which makes for a much less engaging experience.
• Dickens Dark London; this was one of the first Dickens apps that I came across and reviewed, a little harshly perhaps. The idea of the content is nice, with illustrations accompanying a reading of extracts from Dickens’s works, themed around his night walks, but it’s a shame there is so little free content – only one serial installment is provided and the rest are priced at £1.49 each. The best thing about this app is its map feature, which combines an 1862 map with a map of contemporary London, and allows you to scroll between each or view a composite image of the two – great for easily viewing structural changes to the city.
• Celebrating Dickens; the University of Warwick’s Dickens offering includes a wealth of material from researchers and students at the University of Warwick on many aspects of Dickens’s life and writing, and the app features a navigable map of Dickens locations not just in London but also in East Anglia, Kent and the Midlands. Highly recommended, of course!

Creative projects

• “The Houseless Shadow“; directed by William Raban, this is a short version of the full film installation that was commissioned by the Museum of London for their Dickens and London exhibition. The piece uses a reading from Dickens’s essay “The Night Walks” with images of the contemporary city. Raban discusses the aims behind the piece in this conversation recorded at the BFI.
• The Uncommercial Traveller; this project by the British Council created a series of theatrical audio guides to Penang, Melbourne, Singapore and Karachi. The audio aims at creating a really evocative experience of each city and makes for interesting listening even if you aren’t in the relevant city.
• Sketches by Boz: Sketching the City; another British Council project that developed written and artistic creative responses to cities around the world through a Dickensian lens
• Dickens and London film; the British Council produced a collection of teaching resources on Dickens 2012 and I particularly enjoyed this short piece on Dickens and London

 

From year to year: 2012 round-up and 2013 look-ahead

It wouldn’t be the new year without a traditional round-up reflecting on blogging and research activity, so in this post I thought I’d pick out some of my blog highlights of the year (both most-read and personal favourites) and look at how 2013 is starting to shape up.

2012 was of course the year of Dickens, and this blog has seen more than it’s fair share of Dickens posts this year (by March I was considering renaming the blog accordingly!) and as such I’m giving Dickens a round-up of his own:

1. Happy Birthday Dickens! On the day of the bicentenary I spoke on BBC Coventry & Warwickshire radio about Dickens’s connections to the Warwick and Coventry area, which I picked up on in this birthday blog post about Dickens and Leamington Spa.

2. Consequential Ground: Dickens and the Shakespeare birthplace – as a tie-in to Shakespeare’s birthday celebrations we recorded a short film at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust about Dickens’s role in saving the birthplace and Shakespearean influences in his work, which I wrote about in this blog post (and spoke about in the Stratford Observer).

3. Celebrating Dickens – I recorded two further podcasts, on Bleak House and Little Dorrit, for the University of Warwick’s Celebrating Dickens project and wrote a piece about Dickens’s enduring appeal. The app had 10,000 downloads in the first month of release and is still going strong with extra features added later in 2012.

4. Walking Dickens’s London – in a post for the Journal of Victorian Culture Online I took a walk around London following The Guardian’s Dickens at 200 audio walks, and reflected in this post about the value of retracing literary places.

5. Dickens Day 2012: Dickens and Popular Culture – there were many Dickens conferences this year but Dickens Day 2012 was undoubtedly my highlight (I also attended Dickens and the Visual Imagination, Dickens’s World, Dickens and the mid-Victorian Press, and I blogged about the strong Dickens presence at this year’s BAVS conference)

6. Mobility, Space and the Nation in Bleak House – I ended the year with the first of my Dickens publications in print in the winter volume of English, which is packed full of fabulous articles on Dickens and travel.

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I also managed the occasional post on other aspects of my research, of which my top picks are:

1. “‘What connection can there be?’: Objects, People and Place c.1851” – in a new direction for my research I explored mobility and material culture in Henry Mayhew’s 1851: or the Adventures of Mr and Mrs Sandboys, a follow-up of a paper I gave at the Midlands Victorian studies seminar.

2. Baedeker’s Southern Italy – a few thoughts on this 1912 edition of the popular travel guide.

3. Great African Travellers: Attenborough on Livingstone – in another travel-related post I reflected on the resonances of 19th century imperialism in Attenborough’s early work.

4. Locating the Local in William Cobbett’s Rural Rides – slightly earlier than my usual research focus but this reading fit nicely with my current work on Gender and Space in Rural Britain in the long Victorian period.

5. Spitalfields Music – I went to events at both the summer and winter Spitalfields’ Music Festivals and thoroughly enjoyed these explorations of urban history through walking tours. I am a Stranger Here: An East End Exploration toured the Spitalfields streets, while In the House took us into the drawing rooms of Spitalfields Houses for an evening of musical performances.

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2012 was also a good year for guest blogging. I joined the Journal of Victorian Culture online blogging team as a regular contributor – all of my posts are collected here. I also recorded a further piece for the Knowledge Centre on the Victorian Books that TV Forgot, and wrote a piece on Leah Price’s How to do Things with Books in Victorian Britain for Open Letters Monthly. In my work role in early career researcher support I guest-blogged about “Getting out there with your research” for the Religious Studies Network, and joined the Guardian Higher Education Network as a panellist for a Live Chat on Academic Blogging. I was also very pleased to be featured in this article on “Early Career Victorianists and Social Media” by Amber Regis, in the Journal of Victorian Culture 17.3, and invited to join the panel on a roundtable about academic blogging at the Transforming Objects Conference in May 2012.

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Looking ahead to 2013 there are lots of exciting projects in the works. First up, I’ve been invited as guest editor for the next issue of Victorian Network on “Sex, Courtship and Marriage in Victorian Literature and Culture” which will be out in March. Two big publications deadlines are looming: I’m hoping to submit the manuscript of my monograph Journeys in the Victorian Novel: Gendered Mobilities and the Place of the Nation for review in April, and Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840-1920 will be submitted to Pickering and Chatto in August, ready for publication in March 2014. I’m writing up a paper on gender and rural mobility in George Eliot’s early works for this, and also planning to write up work on Henry Mayhew’s 1851 in the near future.

And there’s still more Dickens to come! I’m redrafting my paper on Dickens and literary tourism, and working this into a collaborative piece with Dr Peter Kirwan titled “A Tale of Two Londons: Shakespeare and Dickens in 2012” which will reflect on issues of canonicity and the politics of place employed in the parallel celebrations of Dickens and Shakespeare in 2012, exploring how these shaped and located the nation’s cultural capital in the Olympic year. In April I’m heading to the University of Cagliari in Sardinia as a visiting lecturer to teach classes on Dickens and travel, and later in the year there’s a potential Brussels trip which will enable me to get started on some work in preparation for (yes, really) the 2016 bicentenary of Charlotte Bronte’s birth.

Thank you to everyone who has read, commented and tweeted me about the blog this year, and all the best for 2013!

Consequential Ground: Dickens and the Shakespeare birthplace

Update: the film on Shakespeare and Dickens can be viewed here.

I’ve been writing a lot about a certain birthday this year, but tomorrow (April 23rd) is the day we celebrate another important literary figure: William Shakespeare. Many who have read Dickens’s works will be familiar with the influence that Shakespeare had on Dickens’s writing, but Dickens also played an important role in the preservation of Shakespeare’s literary heritage. In a short film due to be released tomorrow, I talk to Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust about Dickens’s connections to the birthplace and particularly the events of 1847 when the house was put up for auction. The podcast was filmed on location and includes some fascinating materials from the Birthplace archives, including the visitor book signed by Dickens, playbills from productions Dickens put on, and some of Dickens’s letters. In this post, I wanted to think more about how we read Dickens’s initial response to the birthplace, and the issues around literary tradition, tourism and heritage that it raises.

Dickens first visited Shakespeare’s house on a trip to the region in 1838. In his letters, Dickens writes: “we went thence to Stratford-upon-Avon, where we sat down in the room where Shakespeare was born, and left our autographs and read those of other people and so forth”. It’s almost disappointingly brief in its pragmatic recounting of the visit and lacks the emotional investment we might want to find in the meeting-point of two such significant authors. The brevity is, I think, explained when we look at how Dickens treated the idea of Shakespeare and literary places in his fiction.

Dickens refers to the visit in his next work Nicholas Nickleby, humouring those who claim to feel such intense connection to Shakespeare: in the film, I read from a passage in which Mrs Wititterly claims that visiting the house “kindles quite a fire within one”, to which her husband retorts “There is nothing in the place, my dear – nothing, nothing”, and in turn Mrs Nickleby then replies, “I think there must be something in the place…”. The discussion is interesting in its choice of language and the polarities of thought around which the discussion centres: there is either “something” or “nothing” in the place (the use of “nothing” being of course resonant as a significant recurrent word in many of Shakespeare’s plays). In the dichotomy of something/nothing Dickens highlights the extremes of opinion to which people go when talking about Shakespeare, bounding from extreme reverance to complete irreverance (another episode in Nicklebysimilarly recounts such extremes, when Mrs Wititterly claims “I’m always ill after Shakespeare!”).

The debate over whether there is “something” or “nothing” in the place also highlights here the extent to which places themselves can be over- or under-invested with meaning. But it also opens up a space in which we become aware that, in going to extremes, the characters are missing the more important question: there is of course something in the place as a physical site, but what is that “something”? What is the meaning of a place and what is the appropriate meaning it holds? What kind of meaning do we, or should we, invest in places of significance?

I’ve talked about before about a passage in Bleak House in which Jo leads Lady Dedlock through the London streets, eventually arriving at the site where Nemo is buried: it is a burying-ground for the poor, prompting Lady Dedlock to ask “is this place of abomination consecrated ground?” to which Jo, with characteristic linguistic misunderstanding, replies “I don’t know nothink of consequential ground”. The question of what is “consequential ground” – i.e., of meaning, significance and value- becomes a key issue of the novel. That slippage between consecrated and consequentialground is, I think, the crux of the issue in the Nickleby discussion: how do we acknowledge “consequence” or significance without moving into the (un)holy consecration of a site as sacred, and thus invest it with a (false) meaning beyond its true value.

This was an era, of course, in which Bardolatry – an idolatrous investment of Shakespeare as the national poet – was on the rise. Dickens was resistant to the model of authorship this was founded on and the author-worship that this inspired: his use of Hamlet, for example, is typically only to achieve comic effect, whilst others saw Hamlet as epitomising the romantic figure of the author. Dickens’s hesitancy to investing the birthplace with “consecrated” meaning reads as a part of this response to Bardolatry: the brief mention of the visit – “we sat down in the room where Shakespeare was born, and left our autographs and read those of other people and so forth” – recognises the consequence of the visit, but acknowledges that a place can be of consequence without being consecrated, of importance without being over-invested with an excess of meaning.

That’s not to undermine the fact that Dickens does recognise that there is something in a place and that there is a value in preserving literary heritage as a site of significance for the nation. His role in the saving of the birthplace is further interesting in light of the fact that literary tourism would come to play such a central part of Dickens’s own literary heritage. The issue of national place, and what makes national place “consequential”, runs throughout Dickens’s work; in the Shakespeare birthplace, Dickens clearly found a site of national consequence and meaning, and his role in saving the house has preserved one of the most important sites of Britain’s literary heritage.

The podcast on Shakespeare and Dickens will be launched tomorrow on the Celebrating Dickens website and accompanied by an article on the Knowledge Centre.

A Novel Idea: the Victorian Books that TV forgot

My latest podcast with the Knowledge Centre has been published with an accompanying article this morning.

Titled “A Novel Idea: the Victorian Books that TV Forgot“, I discuss the limited range of nineteenth-century novels which are taken up by film and tv producers. However, the recent Wuthering Heights film is a good example of how new adaptations of familiar texts can add value to wider understanding and interpretations of novels; Andrea Arnold’s casting of a black Heathcliff opened up postcolonial critical perspectives that are now well established in literary criticism but, judging by the media response to the film, are not so familiar to wider audiences. As literary criticism continues to develop new perspectives, new possibilities continue to arise even for those texts that have already been frequently adapted. That said, I do have a few suggestions for other texts that would make for good tv – you’ll have to listen to the podcast to find out which ones!

Dickens, Travel and Little Dorrit

This week the Knowledge Centre have published a second piece based on my podcasts, “Dickens, Travel and Little Dorrit“:

“Charles Dickens was fascinated with travel, and this is reflected in Little Dorrit which features continental locations such as Marseilles, Rome and the Alps. Yet why did he represent Europe as a hostile place in this novel, and what can we glean from him about British tourists of the period”

The Interconnected Worlds of Bleak House

Following the podcasts I recorded for the Celebrating Dickens site, Warwick’s Knowledge Centre have run a piece on my work, titled “The Interconnected Worlds of Bleak House“. A piece on travel in Little Dorrit will also be published next Friday.

Celebrating Dickens

As I have mentioned previously, Warwick have a Celebrating Dickens website that draws together researchers from across the university discussing their perspectives on Dickens and Victorian life.

The website has just been updated with more podcasts from researchers around the University, and I’ve contributed two podcasts discussing my own research: the first is on travel and mobility in Bleak House, and the second discusses representations of Europe in Little Dorrit.

2011 round–up

2011 saw a bit of a change in direction for this blog, reflecting my change in position: back in April I was awarded my PhD, meaning a shift in my status as a researcher and less consistency to my research activity. I’ve been working on lots of smaller research projects, and have been adapting to fitting research into a busy teaching schedule accompanied by a part-time job. As well as the time taken by these activities, I now run 3 other blogs – 2 for my students on The English 19th-century novel and Modes of Reading, and 1 through my role as ECR project officer in the Research Exchange – so research blogging is often not a priority in my limited “spare” time.

Having said that, all of this has been productive for my blog – in fact, only in 2008 did I write more posts than this year! Multiple smaller projects simply means that there are more bits and pieces to blog about, and it’s been a busy year for Victorianists thanks to a certain birthday approaching next year. Joining the academic community on Twitter has also proved stimulating and further increased the interactivity and enjoyment of blogging – for example, leading to some cross-referencing in blogging as well as the discovery of several new Victorianist blogs to read (see the recently updated sidebar).

So to wrap up the year, here are my favourite and most-read posts of 2011:

1. “Moving on and moving on”: Mobility in Bleak House; written 10 days before my viva, this post is a good example of the uses of academic blogging: this blog provided the starting-point for ideas that grew into one of my most enjoyable and productive pieces of research. I’ve since presented a paper, written an article, and am now formulating my monograph proposal around this research.

2. Old and new; reflections on the past, present and future of new media drawing together the iPad and Victorian periodical publication. I also wrote two other posts on Victorian studies and new technology: reviews of The Waste Land appand the Dickens’s Dark London app.

3. “What connection can there be”: the Great Exhibition of 1851; some research on the Bleak House paper led me to read more about the Great Exhibition, and here I blogged about the images that accompany Henry Mayhew’s comic novel 1851 – I still find these images fascinating.

4. “Can you shew me the places?” Dickens 2012 and Literary Tourism; one of my bicentenary reflections, using the urban tour of Bleak House to offer perspectives for interpreting the popularity of Dickens walking tours.

5. Wuthering Heights: it’s not all about Dickens! This is my initial response to the recent film of Wuthering Heights.

That’s my top 5, but also noteworthy are the posts about 3 excellent conferences I attended: Modes of Transport at KCL in May, Travel in the 19th Century at Lincoln in July, and (if I may say so myself!) the symposium Rural Geographies of Gender and Space, Britain 1840-1920 that I organised in September.

Looking ahead to 2012 I expect there will be the odd Dickens post or two (!), but my latest emerging projects are diverging into some different directions: I’ll be revisiting my work on George Eliot’s Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss in preparation for a paper to be presented at Moving Dangerously in April; the work on Rural Geographies is continuing with plans for a publication of papers from the conference; and I’m looking into developing a research network on 19th century mobility with another Warwick post-doctoral researcher. I’ll also be contributing soon to Warwick’s Celebrating Dickens 2012 website.

I’ll be back in the new year with posts on all of these activities; until then, have a happy new year!

Wuthering Heights

“With regard to the rusticity of Wuthering Heights, I admit the charge, for I feel the quality. It is rustic all through. It is moorish, and wild, and knotty as the root of heath.”

In Andrea Arnold’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights,these reflections by Charlotte Brontë on her sister Emily’s novel become more pertinent than ever: not so much in that it is moorish, wild, knotty, rustic, but in the suggestion that we “feel the quality”. In Arnold’s stripped-bare adaptation it is feeling, both physical and emotional, that dominates this Wuthering Heights.

It is, from the start, a violent film: raw and bleak, muddy and bloody. The film doesn’t shy away from a brutal violence either amongst its characters, or in its depictions of rural life. The landscape is, throughout, prominent – more so, perhaps, than in Brontë’s novel – but not sentimentalised, idealised or romanticised. Here, the landscape simply is; through camera-angles burrowing through the heath or focusing on a grub, the land is left to speak for itself. The absence of music – or even much speech –contributes to this: detailed sights are accompanied by sharply focused sounds that further add to the effect of not just seeing, but really feeling the landscape.

Likewise, the emotions here are raw, bleak, simple; characters simply are rather than given the feeling of being “interpreted” or presented. They are left largely unexplored in terms of psychological depth, driven by emotion – not so much in terms of there being explicit, recognisable forces or motivations, but that there is little other than response and feeling behind each action and movement. Interpretation seems to take a back seat for both actors and viewer; it’s a strange experience to watch this film, as we’re not asked to interpret, question or even engage in the way we might usually with a film or text. It’s a form of realism which, whilst appearing to strip back technique, or mediation simultaneously persists in making us aware of the process of viewing.

As a result, the film seems to resist much of what we might want to read into it in terms of its depiction of gender and race. In the first half of the film the young Cathy and Heathcliff, both individually and together, resist being interpreted as raced/ gendered types and, as with the rest of the text, simply exist in and of themselves; individual mannerisms, behaviours, emotions surface here.

This in turn complicates how we read what has become the most talked-about aspect of the film, that this Heathcliff is the first non-white Heathcliff; but how significant is this in the film’s presentation? The problem with so much critical interest in this aspect of the film is that the viewer goes in with an expectation and, perhaps, an agenda to focus on the portrayal of race and what interpretation this lends to the text. This is, to an extent, always true in so far as a film of Wuthering Heights has to take a critical judgement on the most interesting ambiguity of the text, Heathcliff’s unknown origins. One of the most interesting and anxiety-ridden elements of the text is that the question of Heathcliff’s origins resist interpretation: it’s the fact that Heathcliff could potentially be from anywhere that lingers as the text’s most pervasive yet unspoken fear.

Equally, it isn’t impossible that Heathcliff “could” be black: his origins are unknown and he is variously read as being Chinese, Indian, Spanish, American, or African. As critics such as Susan Meyer have argued, regardless of his “actual” origins, Heathcliff is read by others in the text as “black”, positioned as the black subject through the treatment by other characters who subject him “to the potent gaze of a racial arrogance derived from British imperialism” (Imperialism at Home).

Here, Heathcliff’s origins remain a subject of some doubt: the film retains lines in which he’s referred to as a “little Lascar”, or speculating that he might be “the son of an African prince or Chinese queen” (slightly altered from “your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen” in the text). This brings to the surface the nineteenth-century Imperial perspective in which all non-white subjects are collectively grouped together as “black”, regardless of actual origins; the brutality of violence enacted on Heathcliff here served to reiterate the power dynamic within this. But beyond this, it didn’t feel as though the film was working to make a particular point “about” race and the nineteenth century; the violence extends throughout all characters and, as with other elements of the text, his race is presented in a matter-of-fact manner.

If the film does anything to make this about Heathcliff, it’s that it centres him as narrative perspective. This gives more structure and coherence to a text which is notably unstable in its narrative perspective, and for that reason this becomes a narrative of Heathcliff. Perhaps as a result of this, the blurred relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff felt less prominent and less intense; and of Cathy’s most famous lines “he’s more myself than I am” and“Nelly, I am Heathcliff”, the first is cut short and the latter omitted. Interestingly, this therefore serves to break what Susan Meyer notes as a recurrent motif in the nineteenth-century novel of a representational yoking of white women with people of non-white races.

In terms of structure, the film follows most other adaptations in only focusing on the first half of the novel. Having said that, it’s still very much a film of two halves, with the switch in actors when Cathy marries and Heathcliff leaves and then returns. As others have noted, whilst Solomon Grave and Shannon Beer are excellent, the second pairing of James Howson and Kaya Scodelario doesn’t maintain much of what the younger actors achieve so well, and the relationship lacks the earlier chemistry; but in some ways, this discontinuity and jarring seemed right to me. Heathcliff returns changed by his journey away, and to find Cathy socialised as Edgar’s wife; the connection of their youth is clearly lost, and the stilted atmosphere that now existed between the two reiterated the inability to recapture what had been lost and the new maturity of the characters. There’s a commentary here, too, about the social impossibility of their relationship, something the text doesn’t engage so much with in its focus on the passion between them. This half of the film therefore operates in the way that the second half of Bronte’s novel does, holding up the first half to scrutiny.

These are just some initial reflections on a film that offers much both in terms of its interpretation of Bronte’s text and in terms of wider ideas about adaptations of nineteenth-century texts; but I’ll be thinking more about both the film and adapations of nineteenth-century texts in general in a piece for the Knowledge Centre with Francesca Scott.

The Dickens Bicentenary

Victorianists can’t have failed to notice that 2012 marks 200 years since the birth of Charles Dickens – there’s been a flurry of conference activity, special issues of English journals, and an increased interest outside of academia too. Today, Guardian Books launched their Charles Dickens at 200 celebration which, as the launch post informs, will commence with podcasts, audiotours, and reviews of new Dickens work. Whilst Dickens is hardly a neglected author, both in academia and popular culture, it’s nonetheless great to see so much interest in his works, not least because I think that one of the interesting things this media attention will generate is questions around the cultural status of Dickens: our “idea” of Dickens, what we invest in the figure of Dickens the author, and issues around symbols of national cultural identity – similar questions to those that arise around Shakespeare. It’ll be good to see if any of the lesser-known works benefit from the increased attention – the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood is to be “given a new ending” by the BBC– and how the collective focus on Dickens’s works enriches understanding of the better-known texts.

At Warwick, the press office is busy pulling together work on Dickens and the Victorian period from researchers across the University: I’ll be contributing two podcasts about my current work, which focuses on various aspects of travel and mobility in Dickens. Further afield, the Dickens Fellowship annual conference is taking place in Portsmouth, which will allow for tours of Dickens-related sites, a Dickens and Birmingham conference will explore the Midlands connections, and Anglia Ruskin University will explore Dickens’s Legacy; overseas, the Dickens Project’s annual conference will celebrate the bicentenary with the conference Dickens!Author and Authorshipbefore spending a week on Bleak House. The Dickens 2012 website details the many other activities taking place – now I just need to work out what to go to!