Birkbeck celebrates 25th annual Dickens Day
On 15 October, 125 Dickens enthusiasts and scholars gathered for a one-day conference at Birkbeck to celebrate the 25th annual Dickens Day.
On 15 October, 125 Dickens enthusiasts and scholars gathered for a one-day conference at Birkbeck to celebrate the 25th annual Dickens Day.
Birkbeck organises Dickens Day every year, in partnership with the Dickens Fellowship and the University of Leicester. It is a unique event in the UK bringing together Dickens enthusiasts from a range of different backgrounds, from general readers to influential academics. Dickens Day was founded by Professor Michael Slater, an Honorary Fellow of Birkbeck and one of the world’s leading experts on Dickens’s life and works, who delivered the keynote address this year.
This year’s event explored Dickens’s travels, and the theme of travel in Dickens’s works. From stagecoaches to railways, sailing ships to steam ships, travel changed forever over the nineteenth century, as new modes of transport enabled people to go faster and further than ever before. Dickens himself travelled to America, which he reached by paddle steamer, and to Italy, France and Switzerland; all are immortalised in his writing, as is Australia, which he only visited in his imagination. While keenly aware of the “railway mania” that was changing the face of the country, and of the opportunities created by the railways, nostalgic descriptions of stagecoach travel also run through much of Dickens’s fiction.
The day ended with a celebratory reception, complete with cake.