Sometimes people with shared interests speak different languages. Last week I read the new Theory & Methodologies section on Victorian studies in PMLA with huge interest, especially @emilysteinlight.bsky.social and Josephine McDonagh's pieces on on US and UK scholars' ambitions for the field at +

NEW BLOG POST 🤩Our James Malcolm Rymer expert, Rebecca Nesvet, reviews Birmingham Rep's production of Sweeney Todd and how it reveals 'the timeliness of penny dreadfuls': victorianpopularfiction.org/the-failure-...

The Failure of Institutions: Sweeney Todd Restages the Timeliness of Penny Dreadfuls

Birmingham Rep’s production reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet Victorian melodrama was not a purely escapist genre, nor was it necessarily conservative. With its mix of epic action and often plebeian chara…

victorianpopularfiction.org

On a train outside of Nijmegen and just saw a really wholesome bit of graffiti beside the line: Cats Rule Everything Around Me.

📚"Covers designed by folk who didn't bother to read the book" Episode 5: Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens. “Get in, loser. We’re going rowing on the Thames in a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance. Also on Wednesdays we wear arsenic green.” #c19th

Dr Laura Eastlake@victorianmasc.bsky.social · 2mo ago

📚"Covers designed by folk who didn't bother to read the book" Episode 4: The Great Gatsby. “They say he killed a man, and bought that big-ass palace with the money he made from his Magic Mike themed speakeasy”

Applications are now open for Round 3 of our Microgrants! We’re funding innovative research in #19thC periodicals by providing seed grants for archival travel, digital access to subscriptions or repositories, or digital tools to support your research. Apply by 1 September here: buff.ly/7r9cM50

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...

dickenssociety.org

Before you head out for August holidays, make sure to grab your virtual spot for TBC6, coming 17-18 September. 🗓️

Association of Adaptation Studies@adaptstudies.bsky.social · 3w ago

⚠️ To Be Continued... is coming in September! Two days + four panels = this SIXTH EDITION of the virtual highlight of our scholarly calendar! Defining, Producing, Performing, Consuming, and Theorising Serials & Adaptations ...since 2021 🕰️ Info & registration 💻 www.monash.edu/arts/media-f...

Thrilled at the invite to give a talk at London Month of the Dead 🖤 "The Cradle & the Grave" will take place on 17th October, at the atmospheric Brompton Cemetery in London. There is an absolute wealth of other activities happening up until 1st Nov too! londonmonthofthedead.com/cradlegrave....

How about Emily Wilson talking about Nolan's film with an adaptation scholar? Can we make this happen?? 👀 👀 👀

Dr. Jennessa Hester 🍒@cherrypoppunk.bsky.social · last wk.

I'd love to hear her talk about Nolan's adaptation with a film scholar. Essentially, a conversation about what The Odyssey has traditionally meant (the classist perspective) and what this new version is trying to convey (the film studies perspective).

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

📣CfP Alert📣 We are delighted to announce that our CfP for the 2027 RRR conference is now open! The deadline for abstracts is the 25th of October. The focus will be on ecosystems of the long nineteenth century 🌱 We can’t wait to read your submissions!

Ebenezer is part of the DCU: the Dickens, Charles Universe

Victorian poetry stans! Excited to say that my article on Toru Dutt and Paradise Lost is now out in Victorian Poetry, and available open access for your reading pleasure and/or heckling. 🌳🐍🌱 @victorianpoetry.bsky.social doi.org/10.1353/vp.2...

✨Suffragettes in Scotland turned to Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford 🏰In December 1909, members of the radical Women’s Freedom League staged a Cranford scene at the Oak Hall Edinburgh Café

Time's (almost!) up at #Dickenssociety2026 as we begin the final academic panel!

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.

Now at #Dickenssociety2026: Michael D. Lewis looks at Ali Smith's Winter and the 'alarming proximity to Dickens's world' that Smith's novel explores.

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

Devastation over the football quickly subsides at #Dickenssociety2026 as @drchrislouttit.bsky.social introduces us to the intricacies of the Dickensian bibliomemoir.

Have been too busy having a great time at #DickensSociety2026 in Aarhus and not posting much as a result, but looking forward to giving my paper on the Dickensian bibliomemoir in tomorrow's early morning slot. A quick preview of one of my slides 👇

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

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

Heidi L. Pennington is tracing layers of secondariness in the life and work of Charles's granddaughter Ethel Dickens at #Dickenssociety2026

A very special treat to finish off the first day of #Dickenssociety2026: a dramatic monologue performed by Annie Elliot -- as nineteenth-/twenty first-century Catherine Dickens. "Real women have bodies that age.... By this time, Charles himself wasn't an oil painting!"

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

“Typographical Exuberance” of serial installments offer excitement for the reader (see below) but Joel Brattin also examines the lack of consistency in Dickens’s textually exuberant writing: Pocket-Breaches or Pocket Breeches? The world may never know. #Dickenssociety2026

Dickens, photography, and the theatre take centre stage in Daniel Novak’s talk on The Old Curiosity Shop, “The Magic Reel.” #dickenssociety2026

Mark Cronin on the verbose, amorous description of Belle’s daughter in “X-mas Carol”: “did he not know he was speaking out loud?!” 😂 The narrator of ‘Carol’ exists in an undefined space—fully realized at times, rhetorical device at others. It changes with each Stave. #Dickenssociety2026

Day 1 begins with an opening from Dominic Rainsford and Dickensian connections to Denmark: Knud Sorensen’s text “Charles Dickens: Linguistic Innovator” (1985) and illustrator, Christian Kongstad Peterson’s wonderful obsession with Dickensian aunts.

Let's go #Dickenssociety2026 🥳