Join us in July 2027 for the 32 Annual Dickens Society Symposium: "Dickens Rocks"! This symposium will be held online and you can find the CFP here: www.dickenssociety.org/symposium

Symposium — The Dickens Society

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📢 New on our Blog, The Cricket: www.dickenssociety.org/the-cricket/...

Mince Pies, Glühwein, and Victorian Nostalgia: The Dutch Dickens Festival — The Dickens Society

This post is contributed by Ella Staps, a student of English language and literature at Radboud University Nijmegen. Her primary research interests are Metamodernism, dystopian and utopian literature,...

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*Journal of Victorian Culture* Graduate Student Essay Prize: Deadline 1 October 2026 #victorian #prizes #scholarship academic.oup.com/jvc/pages/es...

Essay Prize

The aim of the prize is to promote scholarship among postgraduate research students working on the Victorian period in any discipline in the UK and abroad. The

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Next meeting of the Gaskell Society (and by recording) is coming up on Sat 19 Sept. Helen Shay will discuss Gaskell’s relationship with her publishers, including Dickens. See below for details! #Dickens #ElizabethGaskell #Victorian #publishing

LucretiaDorrit@lucretiadorrit.bsky.social · 4w ago

#DickensClub - I'm attending this talk of interest! @gaskellsociety.bsky.social @dickensfellowhq.bsky.social @dickenssociety.bsky.social @littleseamstress.bsky.social @ginadalfonzo.bsky.social @lucysetonw.bsky.social @thatdrooddude.bsky.social x.com/GaskellSocie...

Please find the 2027 NeMLA CFP for The Dickens Society organized by Diana Archibald here: cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S...

📢📰 New on our blog, The Cricket: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Verse of Charles Dickens contributed by Lydia Craig www.dickenssociety.org/the-cricket/...

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Verse of Charles Dickens — The Dickens Society

This blog is contributed by Lydia Craig. Lydia is Assistant Professor of English at Vincennes University and Associate Editor both&nbsp...

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New on our blog, The Cricket 📣 Trailing Round with Dickens: An Enthusiast's Guide to Broadstairs by Carolyn Oulton ✍️🏻 www.dickenssociety.org/the-cricket/...

Trailing Round With Dickens: An Enthusiast’s Guide To Broadstairs — The Dickens Society

This post is contributed by Carolyn Oulton, Professor of Victorian Literature at Canterbury Christ Church University. Carolyn's recent publications include Down from London: Seaside Reading in the Rai...

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And that is a wrap on #RSVP2026 in Dublin! Sláinte! 🥂 Many many thanks to our host @tcddublin.bsky.social, organizers, keynote speakers, social media volunteers + attendees for an incredible conference! And ICYMI: get ready for #RSVP2027 in OTTAWA next year! 🇨🇦 Safe migrations home to all!

Post-Symposium traces of Dickens still abound: “When he had read Oliver Twist Hartmann marvelled that Dickens had had such an acute understanding of the misery of boys.” — Anita Brookner, Latecomers #Dickenssociety2026 #Dickens #summerreads

A symposium first on day 3 of #Dickenssociety2026 : a double panel! Nora Schalkers & Matthias Bauer on the uses of ‘enlightenment’ in Dickens.

Céline Prest gives a dynamic & deft consideration of ‘“I don’t know nothink”: Jo’s Shakespearean Heath of the Mind in Bleak House’. Jo is a tangle of negation and affirmation of thought; he wanders ‘in a labyrinth of signs and symbols’; he bears the grime & traces of the city. #DickensSociety2026

Céline Prest defines Jo’s not knowing “nothink” as equating to his not existing. Jo is continually defined by negative terms and his body gradually loses its integrity through the narrator’s description. #Dickenssociety2026

Football woes in Aarhus dispelled by a cold plunge, and three fabulous papers this morning on Dickensian ‘enlightenment’; Bleak House’s Jo’s knowing ‘nothink’; and performance, dandyism, and deceit. Thanks to Nora Schalkers, Matthias Bauer, Céline Prest, and Anita Fernandez Young #DickensSociety2026

Sailing away with our final speaker of the Symposium, Cathy Waters, who is speaking on “Charles Dickens and George Eliot by the Seaside.” #Dickensociety2026 #GeorgeEliot

Rounding out our wonderful #Dickenssociety2026 panels with Jeremy Parrott discussing Dickens and the application of “Greek principles of order and harmony” to public buildings in London.

Michael D. Lewis and Chris Louttit now shift to Q&A, both having addressed echoes of Dickens in Ali Smith: The Seasonal Quartet offers the “politics of the moment”; Artful gives us a “personal story” & “experience of loss,” in which Oliver Twist is “a form of therapy.” — Louttit #Dickenssociety2026

Now at #DickensSociety2026 Anita Fernandez Young is looking at how characters in Dickens perform for the reader but also for one another - clothes and standards of dress playing a important role

“life becomes illegible outside of capitalism”: Michael D. Lewis on Ali Smith and Dickens. #Dickenssociety2026

Starting the final day of #DickensSociety2026 with Nora Schalkers & Matthias Bauer looking at enlightenment in Dickens

On our second day in Aarhus, Emma Linford throws us into the comic & contentious Victorian courtroom, exploring ‘“Breach of Promise” in Dickens: Legal and Psychological Dimensions in Victorian England’. Here truth, spectacle, private, and public blur. @dickenssociety.bsky.social #DickensSociety2026

After which @sophiajochem.bsky.social offered a thoughtful, thorough, and enormously thought-provoking discussion of abortion narratives in Dickens’ ‘Dombey and Son’. #DickensSociety2026

And our first panel was brought to a patient and moving close with Carolyn Vellenga Berman’s talk on ‘Trauma Thought and the Fragmented Self in ‘David Copperfield’’: what does it mean to suppress, encounter, avoid, and repair? How do we heal and ‘suture’ the fragmented self? #DickensSociety2026

On the second day of #Dickenssociety2026 Ahmed Diaa Dardir explores what he calls the 'orgiastic paradox' in A Tale of Two Cities. May the ecstatic, intoxicating frenzies begin!

Now Aleksandar Stevic looks into Dr. Manette as a personification of A Tale of Two Cities' neurotic response to the violence of revolution. Miss Pross emerges as one of the novel's unlikely psychiatrists in this reading at #Dickenssociety2026

Because we just can't get enough of A Tale of Two Cities at #Dickenssociety2026: Yizhou Feng reads the novel alongside Wei Yi's 1913 A Tale, in which 'patriots' become a 'riotous mob'!

Michelle Allen Emerson speaking about Edwin Stanley Brookes, Dickensian actor, elocution teacher, & psychical researcher, who was witness to “Dickensian Miracle.” After losing his voice before a show, 👻 Dickens lended his voice to Brookes a mere 30 minutes prior to the recital. #Dickenssociety2026

Virginia Zimmerman discussing homemade children’s literature, including the Gad’s Hill Gazette’s (produced by Dickens’s younger teenage sons) story on the death of the Dickens’ family dog, Turk. #Dickenssociety2026

Magdalena Pypeć reads Hard Times through the Faust legend, seeing Tom’s engagement with Harthouse a transaction with a “demon familiar” who arrives in Coketown when the town most resembles hell.🔥🔥🔥 #Dickenssociety2026

At #Dickenssociety2026 we hear from @decadentdickens.bsky.social about ghosts, the communication between the living and the dead, and how Dickens believed in ‘the trance state’