March 21, 1995 Contact: Barbara McKenna (408/459-2495)

TEACHERS CAN GAIN EXPERT HELP IN BRINGING PBS SHOWS INTO CLASSROOMS WITH RESOURCE KIT ON MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT AND HARD TIMES

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SANTA CRUZ, CA--To complement upcoming presentations of Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit (April 2-23, locally) and Hard Times (April 30), airing as part of Mobil Masterpiece Theatre on PBS, a resource kit and viewers' guide have been produced for use by educators and the general public.

The materials were coproduced by the Dickens Project at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the British Broadcasting Corporation's (BBC's) Education Directorate. The viewer's guide, suitable for the general public, is titled What the Dickens: A Guide to Martin Chuzzlewit and Hard Times. The 36-page booklet offers a brief introduction to Dickens's life, the two novels, and their adaptation for television.

The resource kit consists of a videocassette, an audiocassette, and two illustrated workbooks, designed to enhance reading of the novels and classroom viewings of the PBS dramatizations. The videocassette supplies accessible and lively background on both the novels and Victorian life, employing footage from the BBC's vast archive and interviews with internationally renowned Dickens scholars. The audiocassette will spark children's imaginations with the sounds of Victorian times--circuses, trains, passing carriages, and more. A classroom workbook, Doorway to Dickens, offers activities, teaching assignments, quotations, and illustrations to be used in conjunction with the video- and audiocassettes. A teacher's resource guide provides further background on Dickens and his time through specially commissioned essays and classic studies of Martin Chuzzlewit and Hard Times.

The Dickens Project, founded in 1981, is an international consortium of faculty and graduate students headquartered at UC Santa Cruz. The home of an extensive library and archive on Dickens, the project promotes collaborative research and produces curricular materials for use in teaching Dickens.

Martin Chuzzlewit is coproduced by BBC's Pebble Mill and WGBH Boston; Hard Times is coproduced by BBC School Programmes--a division of BBC Education--and WGBH Boston.

For information on obtaining either the resource kit or the viewer's guide, please call the Dickens Project at (408) 459-2103.

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