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November 23, 1998
The work of Charles Dickens has always been versatile, appearing first in serial magazine installments, later as full novels and on the stage, and eventually, on radio, television, and the big screen. It's not surprising then, that Dickens's works have also adapted well to the latest entertainment medium, the World Wide Web.
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"The Boffin Progress," above, is one of many illustrations from Dickens's Our Mutual Friend that may be found at the new Dickens Project Web site.
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The Web has proved to be a valuable avenue for archiving and exploring the work of the popular novelist, and the medium has been used to great effect by the Dickens Project, a multicampus research consortium based at UCSC. The Dickens Project is pleased to announce that, in collaboration with the British Broadcasting Corporation, it has expanded its award-winning site to include pages that complement the BBC's 1998 dramatization of Dickens's Our Mutual Friend. (The U.S. broadcast of the program will take place January 3-5, 1999, on Masterpiece Theatre on PBS.)
"Our Mutual Friend: The Scholarly Pages" is an electronic archival resource dedicated to gathering and providing scholarly information on Dickens's last completed novel. The Web site offers a virtually inexhaustible storehouse of information for those who wish to explore in depth the complicated "web" of this novel.
Highlights of the site include: a comprehensive bibliography of recent scholarly literature on Our Mutual Friend; an electronic version of the text, searchable by word; electronic scans of the original Marcus Stone illustrations; contemporary reviews of the novel scanned from the original periodicals; historical essays thematically related to Our Mutual Friend; excerpts from Dickens's correspondence during the writing and publication of Our Mutual Friend; a "virtual issue" of never-before-published 19th-century advertisements from the original serial parts; and more.
This new Web site, as sprawling in scope as the Dickens novel itself, speaks to everyone from the high school student reading Dickens for the first time to the university professor in need of an up-to-date article on Victorian poorhouses in the 19th century.