National Dickens Readers Day, a national event celebrating the 200th anniversary of the author’s birth, organised jointly by Lancashire County Council Cultural Services team and The Reading Agency, comes to Lancaster on Sunday 4th November.
The event at Lancaster Library will feature a host of highly regarded authors and speakers including Claire Tomalin, Dickens’ Biographer. Its aim is to help us discover why we might still consider reading Dickens in the 21st Century.
The landscape of Lancashire inspired three of Dickens’ stories and
he visited the county several times as part of his popular reading
tours.
Dickens visited Lancaster in 1857 together with fellow novelist Wilkie Collins. He
was a great public speaker and was renowned for giving dramatic readings
of his work and he did one of these at the Grand Theatre in Lancaster, the
third oldest theatre in the UK. He also stayed at the
Kings Arms Hotel in the city and the hotel is thought to feature in the
story ‘The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices’ which he co-authored with
Wilkie Collins and which was published in ‘Household Words’ in 1857.
‘Mr. Goodchild concedes Lancaster to be
a pleasant place. A place dropped in the midst of a charming
landscape, a place with a fine ancient fragment of castle, a place of
lovely walks, a place possessing staid old houses richly fitted with old
Honduras mahogany, which has grown so dark with time that it seems to
have got something of a retrospective mirror-quality into itself, and to
show the visitor, in the depth of its grain, through all its polish,
the hue of the wretched slaves who groaned long ago under old Lancaster
merchants. And Mr. Goodchild adds that the stones of Lancaster do
sometimes whisper, even yet, of rich men passed away—upon whose great
prosperity some of these old doorways frowned sullen in the brightest
weather—that their slave-gain turned to curses, as the Arabian Wizard’s
money turned to leaves, and that no good ever came of it, even unto the
third and fourth generations, until it was wasted and gone.’ (Chapter 3,
‘The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices’)
For students and those in reading groups the event is FREE. Please book your group in by phoning 01995 607661.
• National Dickens Readers Day – Sunday 4th November, Lancaster Library. Tickets cost £7.50 (including lunch) and can be obtained from the Dukes Theatre: 01524 598500. Info online: www.dickens2012.org/event/national-dickens-readers-day-0