Free Thinking

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Free Thinking: Dickens

Dickens

BBC Radio 4 - Free Thinking, Dickens

Mathew Sweet, Linda Grant, Laurence Scott & Lucy Whitehead -150 years since Dickens' death

Dickens died on June 9th 1870.  Matthew Sweet and his guests have been re-reading novels including Bleak House and Great Expectations and looking at how his biography was written.

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 Grangerising. 

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

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