* June 9th marks the anniversary of Charles Dickens’ death, and a moment to pause and appreciate our main man, and one of the most unforgettable storytellers the world’s ever known. Though he passed away in 1870, Dickens is anything but forgotten. His books are still read, his characters still quoted, and his messages still […]
* This being his birth month, we couldn’t possibly let the month go by without a blog on our main man – Charles Dickens. Our Victorian celebrity gifted the world with timeless tales of love, loss, and, of course, the occasional ghostly visitation (what happy, holiday story would be the same without one?). Did you […]
Hans Christian Andersen was born in Odense, Denmark, on the second of April, 1805. As a small child, Andersen’s father read to him Arabian Nights – thus introducing the young child to both classic literature and what one might deem a “fairy tale”. At the age of 14, he moved to the capital to become an actor […]
Every year we post a blog about Dickens around this date… it is his birthday, after all! What better way to honor our main man than keep his writing and memory alive? This year we thought we’d do something a bit different – instead of a long rambling blog about some aspect of his life, […]
By Margueritte Peterson Get yourselves ready for one of the most morbid (therefore, we celebrate it in high style) days of the year… the anniversary of Dickens’ death! Every year we do a Dickens blog around this day, though I prefer to think of it more as a celebration of life blog, rather than as […]
By Margueritte Peterson “[Menken] is a sensitive poet who, unfortunately, cannot write.” -Charles Dickens Adah Isaacs Menken died in Paris on August 10, 1868, only eight days before her collection of poems, Infelicia would be published. Dedicated to Charles Dickens, Infelicia highlights Menken’s complicated relationship with her literary contemporaries—and, perhaps, her unfailing talent for generating […]
No one reading a Dickens novel can deny the author’s enthusiasm for the theatrical. To see a young orphan used and abused by adults at every turn, to have to bear a young girl dying and her desolate grandfather withering away by her grave, or a miser being shown the error of his ways by […]
Charles Dickens, in many ways, stands for Victorianism; indeed it’s impossible to think of the era without him, and he defined the period in many ways. Yet we cannot assume that Dickens represents his contemporaries in all things. His own upbringing shaped his sense of social justice in ways that did not always reflect the […]
One hundred years after Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published, Langston Hughes called the novel “the most cussed and discussed book of its time.” Hughes’ failure to comment on the literary merits of Uncle Tom’s Cabin hints at the persistent disagreement among writers, critics, and the reading public about the novel’s actual quality. […]
On April 1, 1848, modern Spiritualism was born in Hydesville, New York. That day, teenage sisters Margaret and Kate Fox announced that they had communicated with the spirit of a man who had been murdered in their house years before. A report of the incident first appeared in the New York Tribune, and it was […]