Hotel that inspired Charles Dickens added to Heritage at Risk Register alongside Gunpowder Plot house
Charles Dickens described it as an enormous, labyrinthine tavern that was “known far and wide” and famous for its stone statue of an animal “distantly resembling an insane cart-horse”.
He was a regular guest at the Great White Horse Hotel in Ipswich, Suffolk, and was so captivated by the place that it helped inspire him to write his first novel, The Pickwick Papers.
Continue reading...Collins’s notes on his collaborator’s ‘weakest book’ and ‘astonishingly bad’ work were sold at auction in 1890
Charles Dickens may be lauded by many as the greatest Victorian novelist, but one close friend did not demur from fierce criticism after the writer’s death.
Wilkie Collins, the author of The Woman in White, collaborated on drama and fiction with Dickens and the two enjoyed a long, close friendship until Dickens’s death in 1870.
Continue reading...League of Gentlemen star’s two programmes are part of a rich seam of shows about the supernatural this year
This year’s Christmas TV and radio schedules feature more spooky and supernatural content than before the pandemic, reflecting a hunger for answers during uncertain times or grief for loved ones.
That’s according to Sherlock and League of Gentlemen writer and actor Mark Gatiss, who will be appearing in two ghostly programmes over the Christmas period.
Continue reading...Museum exhibit reveals the huge effect the The Pickwick Papers had on readers
Charles Dickens’s comic novel The Pickwick Papers, often overlooked today as a lighthearted period piece, was once a matter of very serious concern to thousands of fans across the world, some of whom adopted the personas of their favourite characters and founded appreciation societies.
Now the earliest proof that Mr Pickwick became central to the lives of many fans is to go on display at the Charles Dickens Museum in the novelist’s former London home in April. The Minute Book contains the official club notes of the first known Pickwick club and gives a clear picture of the way the book brought friends together to discuss the plots and debate social issues of the day.
Continue reading...The writer’s archaic shorthand has baffled experts for over a century. So they launched a deciphering competition for fans – with stunning results that cast new light on his love life and financial peril
Despite all the precision he brought to bear on his intricate plots, Charles Dickens was a notoriously messy writer. His manuscripts are full of inky splodges, with barely legible alterations crammed in between scrawled, sloping lines. Worse still was his love of a type of shorthand dating from the 1700s. To this, he added his own chaotic modifications to create what he called “the devil’s handwriting”.
Fond of puzzles and codes, the great Victorian writer used these time-saving hieroglyphics to make notes and copies of his letters and documents, reams of which he burned. Academics are still toiling to decipher 10 shorthand manuscripts that survived. Forget Wordle. This is the Dickens Code. And for a long time, it had seemed uncrackable.
Continue reading...The writer and actor puts the ghoul into yule with screen and stage roles reprising haunting classics from Charles Dickens and MR James
Close the curtains. Light the fire. Then prepare to be terrified; it’s Christmas. For although the word “cosy” may be closely tied to festivities at this time of year, so it seems is the word “ghost”.
In northern Europe people understandably cope with the shorter days and darker evenings by drawing in around a roaring hearth, metaphorical or otherwise. Light and warmth: it makes sense. But what kind of stories are told while friends and families gather together? The answer, of course, is the spookier, the better.
Continue reading...The former League of Gentlemen star on his love of low-budget British spinechillers, his loathing of Brexit and a slew of projects opening this winter
Mark Gatiss scans the breakfast menu at an east London restaurant with a famished eye. We’re at the hinge moment between the nightlife of an A-lister, who attended the James Bond premiere the previous evening, and the day job as an actor who, by his own account, could only land a role he had wanted all his life by writing the play himself. “It was a long evening,” he says of No Time to Die. He hadn’t had dinner and was trying to stave off the hunger pangs by sipping water, but not too much, because he couldn’t get out to the loo: “So I’m just really hungry.” He’s like a jovial Eeyore, painting himself into a lugubrious picture of the turnip fields of celebrity, before deciding, with a giggle, that a hearty breakfast of avocado on toast is exactly what’s needed to put everything to rights.
This is certainly no time to die of hunger for Gatiss, who has rocketed out of the pandemic as one of British showbusiness’s most sought-after all-rounders. He’s currently putting the finishing touches to his remake of the 1972 children’s film The Amazing Mr Blunden while rehearsing his new adaptation of A Christmas Carol. The latest in a series of half-hour ghost stories, The Mezzotint, is ready to roll into his now customary slot on the Christmas TV schedules. But it’s not all fear and Victorian clothing, he spent part of the lost year in the Outer Hebrides, playing a country doctor in a first world war romance, The Road Dance, and another part messing about in a pedalo on a boating lake with his old League of Gentlemen muckers Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith for a new series of their TV comedy Inside No 9.
Continue reading...Bridge theatre, London
Simon Russell Beale stars in an economical Dickens adaptation that reminds us of the richness of live theatre
What has made this Victorian tale of child poverty, stalking apparitions and pathological miserliness chime across the ages? GK Chesterton cited the defeat of humbuggery and triumph of happiness. George Orwell wrote of its myth of moral transformation and the “good rich man, handing out guineas”. More recently Jack Thorne spoke of its resonance in our era of austerity.
Nicholas Hytner’s adaptation at the Bridge theatre certainly has an economy of scale. A powerhouse three-strong cast, Simon Russell Beale, Patsy Ferran and Eben Figueiredo, play every character between them alongside song, dance and nimble, poignant puppetry. But the show seems less concerned with austerity than reminding us of the richness of live theatre and offering an imaginative escape from our pandemic-scarred realities.
Continue reading...Armando Iannucci is not someone you’d describe as having a commanding presence. He doesn’t want to consume all the oxygen in the room or, with a show of bored impatience, imply that it’s your good fortune to share his company. He may be well known, but there’s nothing of the celebrity about him. Short, balding and understated in manner, he could pass for a provincial loss adjuster come to assess your insurance claim. But he is arguably the most influential figure in British comedy of the past three decades, not to mention an accomplished film director.
When I meet him at a London hotel, he is busy promoting his third feature film, The Personal History of David Copperfield, an adaptation of Charles Dickens’s eighth and most autobiographical novel. His first film, In the Loop, grew out of his seminal satirical TV comedy The Thick of It. The second, the highly acclaimed The Death of Stalin, was a darkly comic but historically accurate account of the Soviet dictator’s end and its farcical aftermath.
Continue reading...Printed in 1843, the hand-coloured card originally sold for one shilling and shaped the popular tradition
The world’s first printed Christmas card, an artwork created in 1843 that went on to spawn a global industry, has gone on show at the Charles Dickens Museum in London.
Designed by Henry Cole and illustrated by John Callcott Horsley, in the same year that Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was published, the hand-coloured card shows a family gathered around a table enjoying a glass of wine with a message: “A merry Christmas and a happy new year to you.”
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