The Old Curiosity Club discussion
General Discussion
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Please Introduce Yourself
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Débora wrote: ".......nothing like a good reading (like Dickens) to bright my day."Thank you Débora! I totally agree with you.
Welcome Alana!
Hi and welcome Alana, and anyone I may have missed :) Dodgy internet at the moment, but I hope to get to know all our new fellow Dickens enthusiasts when I jump into the The Mystery of Edwin Drood read, which unfortunately will be a little delayed.
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I'm looking forward to our discussions here!
Welcome to the group, Debora and Milena! I apologize for missing your intro posts. And welcome to anyone else that I've missed since being absent from the group the past couple of months.
Thank you Linda. I'm glad to be here. :)
Hi Guys. I just joined your group. This looks like the sort of group I need to help me through Dickens.I wont be joining you for Drood. Doing exams at present - Honours year for BA (English Lit). But am looking forward to joining you for for "The Haunted Man"
Cordelia wrote: "Hi Guys. I just joined your group. ...."Glad to have you with us, Cordelia. Looking forward to spending the holidays with you!
Welcome Cordelia from this here fellow English Literature major.
Thanks guys. Very happy to be here.
And welcome from me too, Cordelia - one of the few English members of our group. Looking forward to hearing your views when you join in a read.
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Welcome to the Curiosity Club! We are looking forward to your joining our lively discussions!
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We have members from all over the world. I look forward to your comments.
And good for you to be a life-long learner.
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I am new to your group and relatively new to the Dicken's fan club in general. I first read Dickens for a college class about a year ago and have been able to read nothing else since!
I ..."
Hannah
Welcome. Perfect timing to join us as we will shortly begin our Christmas read.
We look forward to a great discussion.
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As Peter said, it is a perfect moment to join this club, not only because we'll start our Christmas read soon, but also because in January, we are going to start our chronological reading of Dickens's novels from the very beginning again, i.e. with Pickwick Papers.
We never read the books at a very swift pace so that even if you happen to fall back for whatever reason, you'll have a fair chance to catch up with the group. Reading Dickens slowly and with a view to detail has proved a valuable experience to me, and I hope you are going to enjoy discussions here and feel invited to join in with your own ideas.
Welcome Hannah! I hope you enjoy it here :)
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Hi, I'm Julie, and I live in Bellingham, WA--not far from some of you, I gather. I've been teaching literature at the college level for two decades now, including Dickens. One of the things that interests me most about him is that he was not only a brilliant writer but a brilliant publisher who figured out how to make the most of the media of his day, including cheap print for serials, and so I'm very pleased to find a group that reads his works in serial form. If I had to pick a favorite Dickens novel it's probably Tale of Two Cities. If I had to pick a least favorite... well, I admit there's one I couldn't get through, but maybe I'll wait to know you better before finishing up with that confession. I haven't read Nicholas Nickelby, Dombey and Son, Little Dorrit, or Edwin Drood at all, and I haven't read Haunted Man, so I'm looking forward to starting that with you. I was lucky enough to spend a fair amount of research time one year browsing through issues of Household Words. I guess what I like most about CD's books is the richness of the language and imagery. Every time I pick one up again I feel a little shock at how good it is. Every time I forget.
I live with my ethnobotanist husband and two sons, ages 17 and 7, and a very forgiving Welsh corgi.
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Welcome Julie, and I couldn't agree more: "Every time I pick one up again I feel a little shock at how good it is. Every time I forget."
Kim wrote: "Welcome Julie! It is nice to meet you. :-) I love corgis, they are just the cutest little things. Of course I love all dogs, but cocker spaniels are on the top of my list."Thanks! I worked three years at a vet clinic in high school and met a lot of cocker spaniels and can't recall ever being bitten by one, even when I'm sure they felt I deserved it. They are very sweet dogs.
Jean wrote: "Welcome Julie, and I couldn't agree more: "Every time I pick one up again I feel a little shock at how good it is. Every time I forget.""Yes! Dickens has become so famous as a character himself that it's easy to forget he earned it as a writer first.
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Kim wrote: "I'll still never own any dog but a cocker."I love a lot of dogs, but this is how I feel about corgis. You know when you've found your breed.
Julie wrote: "Yes! Dickens has become so famous as a character himself that it's easy to forget he earned it as a writer first ..."In January we begin our second time reading through all "the Inimitable"'s novels, very slowly, just two or three chapters a week. So you wouldn't think we would be likely to forget the quality of his writing really. And yet each time I am stunned by his ability to make me laugh, and then sometimes immediately afterwards to make me cry ... But I'm sure Tristram and Kim will say more about how things are organised here :)
Oh, and mine's a border collie LOL!
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Alas, I do not have a pet since we live in an apartment.
I completely agree with you about the power of Dickens. There is nothing quite like him. As a side note, if we could have a dog now it would be a Standard Poodle. No shedding. I was once owned by an Old English Sheepdog whose name was - and what else would it have been - Dickens.
Please join us with our Christmas read of The Haunted Man and The Ghost’s Bargain. I will have the pleasure of moderating that novella in December and will look forward to your comments.
You are right about living near other members of the Curiosities. I live in Victoria as does Vanessa. Linda lives in Seattle and Everyman is on San Juan Island. With you with us now we have quite a diverse and interesting group.
What larks!
Jean, I was once the designated dogsitter for a friend's border collie because we were a little in love (the collie and me, not the friend), but I knew when I started looking for my own dog that border collies were too smart for me. I admire anyone who can keep up with them. I didn't realize I was going to get to talk dogs as well as Dickens here. Clearly I've landed on my feet.
Peter, thank you for the invite to the Christmas read and I'm very much looking forward to it!
We've always had border collies, but our present one (a white long-haired one with a tri-colour mask) is old and a bit doddery now. We do have a bit of a run in the forest in the morning, but it's nothing like those young ones! On the other hand, he isn't quite so self-willed now he realises he's not as lithe and fast as he used to be!
Welcome to the group, Julie! As Peter mentioned, I am one of your Pacific Northwest neighbors as I live south of Seattle. I'm not a dog owner, but instead lean towards cats and other animals. We used to have several hens and a hamster and four cats, but we've gradually lost some of our furry and feathered friends in this past year and are now down to just two cats. I'm also one of the seemingly few members of the group who is not a teacher and/or literature major, but I instead work in basic science research. All of the Dickens I have read with the group so far have been first reads for me. I'm looking forward to our reading of The Haunted Man soon. In the meantime, I have a mystery involving a man named Edwin Drood to get back to. :)
I hadn't realized the Northwest was such a hotbed of Dickensians. Thanks for the welcome, everyone! What larks indeed.
Julie wrote: "I hadn't realized the Northwest was such a hotbed of Dickensians ..."Neither had I Julie! I feel quite outnumbered here (I currently live just down the road from "The Maypole" inn where most of Barnaby Rudge is focused) but I do love the different slants on everything :)
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Welcome to the group. Look forward to your comments as we work through Charlie. :)
I happen to be in Bellingham at the moment recovering from some medical issues, but am hoping to get back home to San Juan Island soon.
Jean, I look forward to your on-site perspective. And Everyman, I hope you're doing well and make it home all right. I went honeymooning in the San Juans and remember Friday Harbor very fondly.
Julie - I surely have been onsite for Charlie ("Charlie?" Everyman? LOL! Kim, researcher supreme, is there any evidence for this moniker?) for a few decades now. Oddly enough though I hope to move to Thomas Hardy's location within a few years.You know we're all rooting for you, Everyman :)
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Welcome to the Old Curiosity Club! I am one of the very few non-English-as-a-native-language-speaking members and really enjoy having found so many people here who love Dickens as much as I do. Not even among my English teaching colleagues are there any who enjoy reading Dickens, let alone discussing his novels.
I am looking forward to your joining us in our yearly Christmas read. You could not have come at a better time, really.
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I have been told by the internet many times now that Charles Dickens had a son they called Charley who even had the middle name of Boz, and a whole bunch of stuff about Charles Dickens mentioning this son of his and just about everything else you would ever want to know about him. As to a nickname the only thing I found was Boz, which Dickens adopted from the nickname "Moses", a name he had given to his youngest brother Augustus Dickens, after a character in Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield. When pronounced by anyone with a head cold, "Moses" became "Boses"—later shortened to Boz.
Oh, except Everyman, he calls him Charlie.
Welcome, Julie! I hope we'll all have a wonderful time here discussing one of our favorite authors, Charles Dickens!(I loved to read all your conversations about dogs!)
Julie wrote: I love a lot of dogs, but this is how I feel about corgis. You know when you've found your breed."My breed seems to be boxers - I feel disloyal to my other dogs (3 mixed breeds and a yorkie) but my three boxers have been my favorites. They're such clowns. Despite that, I'm hoping my next will be an English bulldog, if I can find one that needs rescuing.
Re: Kim's comment -- is Boz, then, pronounced Bahz or Bohz with a long O? I always thought it was the former. I hate to think I've been saying it wrong. Speaking of which, I watched one of the adaptations of Our Mutual Friend a few weeks ago, and in the commentary they talked about the Lammles. It jarred me when they pronounced the name "LAM-leez" when all this time, I've been saying "LAM-elz"! But what's really funny is that I thought to myself that I must be right, because all of you said it the same way! It took several minutes to dawn on me that I'd never heard any of you actually say the name, but that I have been reading your comments in my own voice. :-) So I'm curious now to know how all of you really do pronounce it.
(And while I'm at it, is the English town in the Cotsworlds pronounced BYbury or BIHbury [or some other way]? Inquiring minds want to know!)
Welcome to the group, Julie! Be prepared for lots of stimulating tangents like this one. ;-)
I've always said "Boz", with a short "o" as in "on and and off". That's how the owner of the antiquarian bookshop in Hay-on-Wye (called "Boz books" as it's mostly devoted to Dickens' works) pronounces it, and I've never heard it another way here.Yes, Lamm-ells. I'm listening to the 10 hour audio dramatisation at the moment, and also have the most recent DVD, so will let you know if they do say it differently!
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Life of Charles Dickens
Commentary:
Boz [boz]: Boz was a very familiar word to me, long before I was an author, and so I came to adopt it.
Charles Dickens
That's Dickens speaking to his friend and biographer John Forster. His Life of Charles Dickens (published shortly after Dickens' death) tried to answer the public's innumerable questions about the man who had dominated their literary world. And one of their top queries: how did Dickens adopt the pen name Boz? They had, after all, first been introduced to Dickens through "Boz". His first stories and serialized novels, from The Pickwick Papers to Martin Chuzzlewit, were marked as either authored or edited "By Boz' - never by Charles Dickens. If this was a strategy by Dickens to surround his first stories in an aura of whimsy and mystery, then the strategy succeeded phenomenally.
But why Boz? Dickens told Forster that it originated with Moses, once a pet name for his younger brother Augustus. But since Augustus "facetiously" pronounced Moses through his nose, Moses became "Boses, and being shortened became "Boz" (pronounced with a long o, as in nose). The name stuck, Dickens borrowed it, and he wisely never told his readers that they were (and we still are) pronouncing it wrong.
From What the Dickens?!: Distinctly Dickensian Words and How to Use Them by Bryan Kozlowski
The Old Curiosity Club
Books mentioned in this topic
A Christmas Carol (other topics)A Christmas Carol (other topics)
The Pickwick Papers (other topics)
The Pickwick Papers (other topics)
Bleak House (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Charles Dickens (other topics)Bryan Kozlowski (other topics)
Thomas Hardy (other topics)
Thomas Hardy (other topics)
Welcome. Please join us as we read MED. It promises to be a great novel.