English department celebrates Dickens’ 200th birthday

To celebrate the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens on Tuesday 7 February, members of the University have put together a week-long project.

The project features a 45-minute documentary about Dickens and a mobile phone app, which was launched on Tuesday, to celebrate his life and work. The app is available for Android, iPhone and iPad. It features discussions with English Literature masters students and a number of interviews about various aspects of the world of Charles Dickens – for example, his attitudes to philanthropy, crime and policing.

Professor John Mee of the English and Comparative Literary Studies Department conducted the majority of the interviews and presenting, while Emily Little, John Lees and their team at the Digital Communications Office managed all of the filming and editing, “on a shoestring budget”.

The Celebrating Dickens website features the entire project including exclusive video content released daily.

There is an interview with Mee’s colleague Dr Pablo Mukherjee, also of the English Department, about crime in Dickens’ “Seven Dials”, along with a number of other experts who discuss the many different aspects of his life as well as reading their favourite Dickens’ passages.

Mee said of the project, “Dickens gives us a sense of the social and political issues in the nineteenth century, and he was obsessed with legal process and questions of equity, perhaps most famously in ‘Bleak House’. Anyone interested in the world we live in now and how it came about should be interested in the site. It’s very good fun with some lively and informative conversations. I think it shows Warwick at its dynamic best, staff and students alike.”

On the extent to which Dickens is still relevant in contemporary society Mee said: “Dickens had a lot to say about a rapidly developing commercial world and where it left more humane relations between people. He developed a narrative technique that was all about speed and the kinds of rapid transitions that we now take as part of our everyday lives, but he was also worried about society developing into a machine that chewed people up or reduced their relations to each other simply into self-interest. ‘Little Dorrit’, after all, is centred on a banking crash!”

Harriet Kilikita, studying an MA in English Literature, was involved in the filming of a documentary and also in one of the series of podcasts. She said: “I really enjoyed being a part of something that celebrates such a great writer, especially as I took the Dickens MA module.”

Ellie Kitchen, fourth-year English and French, also added: “A lot of the themes Dickens was writing about are undeniably still prevalent. I think the project is a great way to celebrate and to raise awareness of a hugely influential writer.”