A night to remember: we had a very festive, super tasty #Dickenssociety2026 conference dinner this evening at the absolutely fantastic(al) ARoS museum in Aarhus.
Ed Grimble
@edwardfgrimble.bsky.social
London-based English and Classics Teacher. Words and essays in print—sporadically—on literature, cities, rivers, and walking. Footsore, having recently wandered over from the Other Social Media App.
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
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
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
After which @sophiajochem.bsky.social offered a thoughtful, thorough, and enormously thought-provoking discussion of abortion narratives in Dickens’ ‘Dombey and Son’. #DickensSociety2026
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
And we’re off! We had a wonderful pre-symposium reception with a beautiful spread of food, glorious food! #Dickenssociety2026
Wonderful to be speaking in Aarhus today for the Dickens Society, on Dickens’ striding and scribbling, and his need for streets in which to be ‘rid of my spectres’. @dickenssociety.bsky.social #DickensSociety2026
Katie Bell 🇵🇸@decadentdickens.bsky.social · 4w ago‘Dickens Thinking on His Feet’: Edward Grimble discussed how aggression peppers Dickens’ descriptions of walking. The imaginative labor required of him to write was difficult to endure; the need to walk the streets was bound to his writing. #Dickenssociety2026