Emily Bell - Dickens Now: The Modern Legacy of a Victorian Author

Why is Charles Dickens one of the most enduring writers of all time? Why does he crop up so often, not only in screen adaptations, but in video games, newspapers, and pop culture, 150 years after his death? And what role can the author and his works play today, against a backdrop of changing attitudes to race, colonialism, gender and history?

This episode will navigate through 200 years of Dickens, considering how the author's attempts to shape his own celebrity status continue to resonate two centuries later.

Further reading:

Emily Bell (ed.), Dickens After Dickens (White Rose University Press, 2020): https://universitypress.whiterose.ac.uk/site/books/e/10.22599/DickensAfterDickens/
Michael Slater, The Great Charles Dickens Scandal (Yale University Press, 2012).
Greg Jenner, Dead Famous: An Unexpected History of Celebrity from Bronze Age to Silver Screen (Orion Publishing Co., 2020).
Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff and Amy R. Wong, ‘Undisciplining Victorian Studies’, LA Review of Books (10 July 2020): https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/undisciplining-victorian-studies/
Amy Davidson Sorkin, ‘The Fever Room: Epidemics and Social Distancing in Bleak House and Jane Eyre’, The New Yorker (20 March 2020): https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-fever-room-epidemics-and-social-distancing-in-bleak-house-and-jane-eyre