February 7th is the 200th Anniversary of the Birth of Charles Dickens

                                             “Dickens Dream,” by Robert William Buss

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The New york Times
January 12, 2012, 2:51 pm Teaching Dickens With The New York Times

By KATHERINE SCHULTEN and SHANNON DOYNE

Updated | Feb. 7, 2012
"Today is the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’s birth, and events are planned all over (though possibly fewer than for 100th anniversary when, according to The New York Times, there was “a worldwide celebration”).
Here are some ideas and resources for celebrating a writer with a “fierce reportorial eye and restless, prodigal imagination” (Michiko Kakutani in 2010) who “could always extract wisdom, pathos, humor from the most unlikely materials, and…never failed to read the man underneath all the strange wrappages that habit, speech and association might have flung around him” (Dickens’s Times obituary in 1870).
Because The New York Times has been publishing since 1851, just as Dickens was beginning the period of his life in which he wrote works like “Bleak House,” “Hard Times,” “Tale of Two Cities,” and “Great Expectations,” we have also included a number of archival articles that show how he was seen in his own day — as well as some that appraise him 100 years after he was born.
Do you teach Dickens? How? Are there resources we’re missing? Let us know, and we’ll continue to update this post."

Five Teaching Ideas

"Define ‘Dickensian’
Type the adjective “Dickensian” into the Times search field and you’ll see that it has been used to describe everything from the life of a 1930’s child star to shades of nail polish to Newt Gingrich’s thoughts on education reform. According to this Times Opinion piece it is defined as “reminiscent of the harsh poverty-stricken living conditions described in the works of Dickens.”
How would you apply the word today? What, whether you find it in the pages of The New York Times or somewhere in your own community, strikes you as truly Dickensian? Why?
Create a 21st-Century Dickens Event
How well does Dickens hold up 200 years later? How would you interest readers today in his works? Perhaps you’d create an app, a museum exhibit, a film or an amusement park with a Dickens theme? Write or sketch your own description of how you might make the milieu of Victorian London — and the Dickens characters who inhabited it — real to a 2012 audience, via whatever medium you choose. Or, just view some of the Dickens updates linked here and discuss which you think are most successful, and why.
Consider 19th- and 21st-Century Attitudes Toward Money and Class
In a 2009 review of a new version of “Little Dorrit,” Alessandra Stanley wrote about how timely the show was just after the Madoff fraud: “‘Little Dorrit’ is particularly apt and enjoyable at this moment in history because the story focuses intently on something deeper and more universal than real estate bubbles or bank runs: unfairness.”
We used her review in our 2009 lesson plan, Greed Is Good?, in which students consider the traits and actions of greedy characters in Dickens stories and other literature. Read it to find many ways to draw parallels between Dickens’s times and our own in comparing attitudes toward money, class, poverty and philanthropy.
Appreciate Dickens’s Characters
In 1995, The Times’s Op-Ed columnist Russell Baker wrote a piece about how he was reading “too much Dickens” but appreciating the character names:

There are Hancock & Flobby, the dry-goods people; Uriah Heep, the pious hypocrite; Sir Mulberry Hawk, the seducer of innocent girls; Ebenezer Scrooge, the soul of greed; Mister Murdstone, the brutal stepfather; Mister Micawber, the eternal debtor; Josiah Bounderby, the loutish mill owner; Lord Lancaster Stiltstalking of the Circumlocution Office, and on, and on.
Because of reading too much Dickens lately, I am amazed at how many real people are going around in Dickensian names.

He then proposed a contest: “Compose a list of 10 well-known living people whose names would have caught Dickens’s eye. Describe the character Dickens would have created for each name. If you feel cocky, fit all 10 into a single plot Dickens might have written, and send to me.” Two months later, he announced the winners.
Take Mr. Baker’s challenge yourself today. Or, try something else similarly simple to appreciate the imagination Dickens lavished on even the least of his characters: Read some of the descriptions he wrote for some of his 989 named characters, and use them as models for describing people you know or invent.
Observe Dickens’s Writing Process
Would you like to see the handwritten changes Dickens made as he wrote the 66 pages of ”A Christmas Carol” in 1843? In 2009, The New York Times put the whole manuscript online and challenged readers to choose the most interesting edit.
For example, writes Alison Leigh Cowan, on Page 3, he inserted ”his eyes sparkled” to amplify the portrait of Scrooge’s nephew, whose beneficence is crucial to the plot, and on Page 12, where Scrooge takes Marley’s ghost to be evidence not of the supernatural, but of his own indigestion (“more of gravy than of grave”), he converted the offending bit of food from being a ”spot of mustard” to a less digestible ”blot of mustard.”
Use Dickens’s writing process to inspire your own. What can you add, take away, move or otherwise change to make your writing stronger?"