91app

On Saturday 12 October 2024, Dickens scholars and enthusiasts will converge on Senate House for the 38th annual Dickens Day conference. Each year the conference focuses on a particular aspect of Charles Dickens’s work. The event originated in 1986 with the desire to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Pickwick Papers (1836). Days on each of the other novels followed, in chronological order by publication; thereupon the topic moved to themes or backgrounds in Dickens’s works, such as popular culture, history and conviviality. .

The topic of Dickens and the Gothic has been chosen for its wide-ranging possibilities. Dickens’s works are infused with Gothic elements and familiar tropes: ghosts, family secrets, mystery lineages, ancient houses, murderers, villains, and grotesque characters. Time and again Dickens was drawn to the uncanny in his works, subverting the cosy domestic scene as often as he upheld it. In selecting the Gothic as theme, the organisers encouraged the submission of a wide range of papers from academics and enthusiasts alike.

Senate House Library has a history of supporting conferences by providing cases for displays of books and manuscripts. With Dickens Day, this collaboration is mutually beneficial. Conference delegates are able to see the tangible objects being discussed; even if you know what illustrations by Hablot Browne (“Phiz”), Daniel Maclise or John Leech look like, nothing substitutes for the original. Delegates furthermore become aware, if they hadn’t been already, of the Library as a resource, whether they are currently members of the 91app or not. 

In return the Library raises its profile, extends its reach beyond its key stakeholders within the University, and demonstrates that its holdings align with - and serve - research interest. More altruistically, the Library benefits from the joy its staff experience from seeing the holdings being enjoyed; from witnessing the humanities enriching lives.

Dickens Day conferences are among the easiest to support, playing as they do to a Library strength in nineteenth-century literature in general and Dickens in particular. The Library has supported several such conferences in addition to holding its own major exhibitions on Charles Dickens, one on Dickens and popular culture (2012) and another on childhood in Dickensian London (2020). 

The library is fortunate because Sir Louis Sterling, who gave the University his library of first and fine editions of English literature in 1956, had a particular penchant for Dickens. Indeed, Dickens is at the origin of his collection:

I remember my initiation into first editions. I was attracted by a very ragged set of Dickens’s Christmas Books. I expected to get them for very little and was surprised when the dealer said that he must charge as much as 30s. because they were ‘first editions’. I bought them with wonderment, decided to explore the mystery further, and thus I became a book-collector.

(Sir Louis Sterling, ‘Preface’, in The Sterling Library, 1954)

Subsequently Sterling acquired the first edition in book form of all of Dickens’s works, in addition to the original parts for three novels. He also bought three private press editions and some additional illustrations. 

Other collectors helped. The actor Malcolm Morley donated his theatrical collection, which included among his set of Dicks’ Standard Plays (cheap late-Victorian reprints of drama) adaptations of several of Dickens’s creations. 

In 1903 the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths had given the University Herbert Somerton Foxwell’s collection of economic literature, which had plenty of material providing insights into Victorian economic and social conditions. So did the collection of the Charity Organisation Society. Alfred Claude Bromhead’s collection of books on London across the centuries added to the background material. The Library also purchased Victorian periodicals and cheap editions of Dickens.

The main challenge with displays for Dickens Day is not to fall back exclusively on early or copiously illustrated editions. These are thoroughly acceptable, and some delegates may not have seen them before, but we also want to demonstrate variety and imagination.

The programme for Dickens Day provides a major impetus, as the programme does for all conferences for which we provide supporting displays. This year there are papers on Bleak House (a sustained example of urban Gothic), A Christmas Carol (full of traditional supernatural Gothic elements), and Uriah Heep, the ‘monster in the garb of man’ in David Copperfield. We are showing editions to illustrate these – taking the verb ‘illustrate’ literally, with the books open at Phiz and Arthur Rackham’s visual interpretation of Dickens characters. 

However, there are also papers on Dombey and Son and Edwin Drood, books which we are not displaying. Instead, we are featuring a Victorian edition of Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, to juxtapose the famous works by the two men who did most in their different ways to reveal the dark underbelly of Victorian London. 

The conference presents Dickens in a continuum with a panel on ‘Dickens’s Gothic Influence and Legacy’, and we are showing a first edition by the horror writer Arthur Machen to back that up – The Three Impostors, which, like Dickens’s work, is set in London. But we are also extending the continuum backwards with an edition of Ann Radcliffe’s famous The Mysteries of Udolpho. Although we possess the rather drab first edition of 1794, we chose to show the equally unprepossessing edition of 1820, compressed from the original four volumes into three, from Mrs Barbauld’s series of British novelists. Mrs Barbauld’s inclusion of Udolpho in her series helps to canonise the book, and thus the edition makes a point that the first edition cannot.

We wish the Dickens Day conference every success, and would encourage everyone with an interest in Dickens, the Victorian era and the Gothic to find out more in Senate House Library.

By Dr Karen Attar (Senate House Library) and Dr Pete Orford (University of Buckingham)