Visiting speaker, 15 Nov 2011: Paul Schlicke on Dickens’s Sketches by Boz

Paul Schlicke will be presenting his paper, ‘The Topicality of Sketches by Boz’, at 5.15pm on Tuesday, 15 November 2011. The talk will take place in the Cardiff Humanities Building, Room 2.48.

Abstract
Sketches by Boz is saturated with topical detail, as Dickens casts his journalist’s eye on the sights, sounds, smells, people, and events of contemporary London. His attention to ‘every-day life and every-day people’ aligns him with Reform, which was challenging elitism with democratic principle. His revisions removing indelicacy in later editions reflect changing attitudes as Victorian propriety replaced Regency raffishness, and his most extensive alterations to the sketches, for the 1850 edition, impacted on the journalism he was then writing for his new periodical Household Words.

Visiting speaker, 15 Mar 2011: Juliet John on Dickens and mass culture

Juliet John will be presenting her paper, ‘Dickens, Mass Culture and the Machine’ at 5.15pm on Tuesday, 15 March 2011. The talk will take place in the Cardiff Humanities Building, Room 2.48.

Abstract
That the idea of Dickens and the adjective ‘Dickensian’ continue to have a cultural resonance which extends beyond the book-buying public almost two centuries after Dickens’s birth is testimony to his sense of himself as a mass cultural artist.

This paper contends that Dickens’s popularity is unique, different even from that of Shakespeare because, writing in ‘the first age of mass culture’, Dickens was instinctively aware of the changed context of art, or of the need for popular art to find its place in an age of mechanical reproduction. It examines Dickens’s attitudes to Culture and the machine, looking forward to the importance of machines to Dickens’s afterlives, and back to the real and symbolic importance of machines in his own day.