CFP
Birkbeck, the University of Leicester, the Dickens Fellowship, and the Institute of English Studies
Senate House, London
October 10, 2015
Deadline: May 31, 2015.

"Dickens Day 2015 – Dickens, Readers and Reading"

Reading is a powerful thing in Dickens’s novels. David Copperfield says of his childhood that ‘reading was my only and my constant comfort’. He goes on, ‘when I think of it the picture always rises in my mind, of a summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life’. If the lonely and unhappy David found reading life-saving, Oliver Twist experiences its deathly associations. He is so disturbed by reading the Newgate Calendar that its pages seem to turn red with gore and he hears its words sounding in his ears.

Contemporaries of Dickens were also keenly aware of the power of literature and they worried about Dickens’s own influence over his vast numbers of readers, particularly the ‘impressionable’ ones – women, younger readers and the lower classes. Despite such concerns, Dickens’s popularity remained undimmed throughout his life and in his last years he reached a new audience with his public readings of his own works.  Reading Dickens had a profound effect on many other writers too and this conference will seek to explore the echoes, referencing and rewriting of Dickens – both celebratory and critical – in later works.

Jointly run by Birkbeck, the University of Leicester, the Dickens Fellowship and the Institute of English Studies, this one-day conference will explore Dickens’s reading, his readers and reading in his work. The organizers invite proposals for 20-minute papers on any aspect of the theme and warmly encourage Dickensians and scholars of all backgrounds and career stages to apply.

Topics could include but are not limited to:

• Reading and readers of Dickens’s work
• Dickens’s relationship with his community of readers
• Descriptions of readers and reading in Dickens’s novels
• Dickens as a reader of Dickens: Dickens’s public readings
• Dickens’s library and what he read
• Dickens 2012: reading Dickens in the bicentenary
• Dickens serial reading projects
• Critics and critical reception of Dickens
• Dickens’s support for charity schools and education
• Illiteracy and non-readers in Dickens’s work
• The Dickens Fellowship and Dickens reading groups

Please send proposals (maximum 500 words) to Bethan Carney, Holly Furneaux and Ben Winyard at bethan.carney@gmail.com, hf35@le.ac.uk and benwinyard@hotmail.com.
The deadline for paper proposals is May 31, 2015.