A Dickens exception

Some of you may recall that I really don't like Charles Dickens (or most of his contemporaries) but there is one notable exception and that is his novella, A Christmas Carol. Earlier this year, I did go to see the filmed-for-3D version starring Jim Carrey. I was expecting utter crap (like, say, Jim Carrey as the Grinch) but was pleasantly surprised -- aside from one ridiculous sequence, it kept close to the original text. Very close, actually. I would recommend seeing it (3D is not necessary to the experience, though.)

Tonight, we've been watching the George C. Scott version (from 1984) and to answer a question (how specific Dickens was in his description of the Ghost of Christmas Past), I looked up the original text on the internet archive (here's a very nice Putnam edition you can read online). Kiddo was reading it over my shoulder and asked to read the whole thing -- so I found a Project Gutenberg edition through Stanza and downloaded it to my iPod. She's now curled up on her bed reading Dickens. How awesome is that?

Of course, my favourite version is probably the Muppet Christmas Carol ("Light the lamp, not the rat!!") which I will watch sometime before the 25th.

Hey! I learned something!

And if you watch this little animated short from the BBC about Charles Dickens, you might learn something too!


If you want to learn more about Dickens, check out the Dickens Project at the University of California or David Perdue's Charles Dickens Page -- which includes a nice article about the illustrators with whom Dickens worked.

Ending on a positive note

Put in my last day of work for a while -- I'm off for just over two weeks -- and ended on a really positive note. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, serial edition from 1836-37 has been digitized and posted on one of our databases at work; the collection is visible globally, though -- feel free to have a peek if you are interested (it still needs an entry page, but the content is there).

Some of the most amusing pages (to me) are the advertisements inside the covers and (in later issues) surrounding the text, though the prices might as well be in ancient Hebrew because I cannot for the life of me work out the price of anything that involves a shilling.

All the stakeholders seem to be pleased with the results including the professor who had requested that it be made available for a class she is teaching in the fall. Due to the time constraints of mounting it before September, we did not run the text through the OCR software; given enough time, that would be my preference for almost every project.

Our next priority (on my return) will be to work through several shelves of theses and upload them to our digital repository. OK, enough about work, I'm on vacation!