Charles Dickens' 200th anniversary celebrations: a renaissance or an elegy?
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Charles Dickens in 1863.
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NEW YORK -- The visitors have been coming at a steady trickle, reverent, bemused, squinting at the crabbed handwriting in the anguished letters from his American tour ("They will never leave me alone ... I shake hands every day ... with five or six hundred people"), the missives on mesmerism, philanthropy, storytelling, Christmas books and his own manic energy.
Charles Dickens celebrates his 200th birthday Tuesday, and while the author of "A Christmas Carol," "Great Expectations" and "A Tale of Two Cities" obviously isn't around to enjoy this tiny, exquisite exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, he no doubt would be pleased at all the attention his birthday is getting -- while simultaneously outraged that readers can now get his novels on Kindle free.
On Tuesday, there will be a grand ceremony at Westminster Abbey in London, where Dickens was buried in Poets' Corner upon orders from his No. 1 fan, Queen Victoria. There's a Twitter feed, mostly earnest but not always ("Breaking News: Times Literary Supplement accused of hacking Dickens' telegrams"); a Dickens festival in China; a half-marathon at Rice University in Houston (Dickens walked at least eight to 10 miles a day); and a full roster of Public Broadcasting Service programming to add to more than 320 films made of his work and the upward of 90 biographies published so far.
Still, is this anniversary marking a renaissance for Dickens, or an elegy?
Not much is going on locally. The University of Pittsburgh's Special Collections Department will mount an exhibition of manuscripts in the spring and the Pittsburgh branch of The Dickens Fellowship plans a Feb. 18 luncheon.
"Very few young people know Dickens and his work unless they read some of it in high school," says Michael Helfand, an associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, who specializes in Victorian literature. "Young people don't read long books any more, excepting Harry Potter."
Perhaps, but "I go into the gallery frequently, and there are good number of young people coming in to see the exhibition who weren't brought in by their parents," says Declan Kiely, curator at the Morgan Library, which possesses the second largest collection of Dickens manuscripts and letters after the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
First Published February 5, 2012 12:00 am
