Online Presentation on
“The Artful Dickens”
by Noted Dickens Scholar John Mullan
Thursday, April 28, 2022, at 4:00 pm
OPEN TO THE PUBLIC - FREE
This is a virtual live event*
For Dickens enthusiasts, this engaging online presentation by John Mullan on literary devices and ploys of Charles Dickens based on his book “The Artful Dickens” will be a special treat.
The event will be moderated by Emily Bell, editor of “The Dickensian.”
What is so good about Dickens’s novels? In this talk, John Mullan will demonstrate the great novelist’s stylistic trickery and narrative ingenuity. Often condescended to by critics as a mere entertainer and a populist who had the nerve to be funny, Dickens was, in fact, a formally audacious, experimental writer. In Bleak House, he divided the novel between chapters in the present tense (narrated in the third person) and chapters in the past tense (in the first person). He would repeat the tense divisions in his last two novels. No one had ever tried such tricks before. Why did he do it? We will discover. And we will look at other examples of his inventiveness, such as his fantastic similes, his flaunting of coincidences, and his uses of smell. The whole aim will be to see why he is such an exciting (and, yes, funny) writer.
John Mullan is Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College, London. He has published widely on 18th and 19th century literature. His most recent book is “The Artful Dickens: the Tricks and Ploys of the Great Novelist” (Bloomsbury, 2020.) His other books include: “What Matters in Jane Austen? (Bloomsbury, 2012,) and “Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature (Faber and Faber, 2007.) He’s also a broadcaster and journalist, writing on contemporary fiction for “ The Guardian.” He published a new edition of Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility” for Oxford World’s Classics in 2017, and has just completed a new World’s Classics edition of “Emma.”
Moderator for “The Artful Dickens” Presentation Dr. Emily Bell is a Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Leeds. She has published several books on Charles Dickens; her most recent book is Dickens After Dickens (White Rose University Press, 2020), and she is currently writing a new biography of Dickens for Reaktion Books. Dr. Bell is Editor of The Dickensian, and also sits on the editorial board of The Oxford Edition of Charles Dickens. She has also published a number of articles on Charles Dickens.
* This is a live-stream event requiring to have the Zoom application installed on your computer. Free download at https://zoom.us/support/download
