Summary
Mathew Sweet with Linda Grant, Laurence Scott & Lucy Whitehead. Dickens died on June 9th 1870. In 1948, the critic FR Leavis published the Great Tradition and included only one Dickens novel but that same year saw the film of Oliver Twist by David Lean. Our panel have been re-reading novels including Bleak House, Martin Chuzzlewit and Great Expectations, looking at a form of Dickens fan fiction following his death, the changes in literary fashion and the way his work connects with the present day.
Linda Grant is the author of books including A Stranger City, The Dark Circle and When I Lived in Modern Times. Laurence Scott is the author of The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World and Picnic Comma Lightning. He is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker. Lucy Whitehead is at the University of Cardiff studying biographies of Dickens and the art of Graingerising.
You might be interested in this conversation about Our Mutual Friend in which Philip Dodd talks with Iain Sinclair, Sandy Welch, Rosemary Ashton & Jerry White https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b0180f5k and a special edition of Radio 3's curated selection of Words and Music featuring readings from Dickens' diaries and letters by Sam West is being broadcast on Sunday June 14th and available for 28 days on BBC Sounds https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006x35f
Producer: Robyn Read
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:33.2 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:37.5 | Hello, my name's Matthew Sweet and this is the Arts and Ideas podcast. |
| 0:41.3 | A Dickensian edition is coming up. |
| 0:43.6 | Delivered to you, as a small boy, might bring you a file and a massive pork pie. |
| 0:48.3 | All the whittles you want after these messages. |
| 0:51.6 | Hello, I'm Jess Gillum. I play the saxophone and I really think you should subscribe to my new podcast, |
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| 1:13.3 | I also have this playlist of my phone called 5am and it's full of classical music. |
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| 1:24.3 | Virginia Woolf declared that she would not cross the street to dine with him. E.M. Forster pronounced him vulgar. |
| 1:31.4 | Aldous Huxley thought his sentimentality was truly pathological. A correspondent on the letters page of the Daily Express agreed, |
| 1:39.8 | I think I am voicing the opinion of a great number of people when I say that Dickens is little red nowadays except under compulsion. |
| 1:49.6 | People who can find pleasure in reading the death of Little Nell display the same psychic qualities as those who stop and gape at a corpse on a city pavement. |
| 2:00.7 | Charles Dickens died 150 years ago. He's |
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