Electric Dickens
As the Guardian reminds us, “For 20 years, a tuppenny weekly magazine run and edited by Charles Dickens was eagerly awaited by a readership who, each Wednesday, were given not only colourful reportage of the events of the day but also drip-fed installments of what later became the writer’s most famous books.”
In honor of Dickens’ upcoming bicentenary, the University of Buckingham is crowdsourcing freelance copy editors to help correct some 30,000 scans of that paper, first called Household Words and then rebranded as All the Year Round.
Historians have been surprised that the first incarnation of the weekly ran advertisements for harlot services and traveling companions, until that revenue was taken away by the increasingly popular Sir Craig’s List of Fascinating Baubles, Antiques, and Adult Services.
Jane says
Jane Fonda: Christian or Barbarella? Hanoi Jane or Ms. Ted Turner? Aerobics prophet or three-way regrettor? Radical Hollywood’s most complicated daughter appears at Indigo on Monday, August 22nd to sign her new book Prime Time.
12PM Free. 55 Bloor W, chapters.indigo.ca
Forget it, Zadie, it’s Istanbul
It’s August and that can only mean one thing: Turkish literary scandals. A translator of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth has claimed that the most prominent of Turkey’s young authors, Elif Safak, has “plagiarized” Smith’s critically acclaimed debut novel.
The NY Press does a good job of sorting out whether it is indeed plagiarism and whether we shouldn’t reach for that word so easily when it comes to fiction and its habit of quoting.
