With mulled wine and lots of Victorian trimmings, students, faculty, staff and community members gathered in Dinkelspiel Auditorium in December to begin reading, all together now, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations.
Marco Barricelli, a repertory actor with San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, read aloud the first several of the 36 chapters that chronicle the life and times of Pip, Estella, Miss Havisham, et al. Initial chapters also were published in Stanford Report and the Palo Alto Weekly in December. Succeeding installments are available weekly—as they were serially published in Dickens’s All the Year Round journal—by mail or on the web at dickens.stanford.edu.
“Discovering Dickens: A Community Reading Project” aims to recreate the kind of group reading experience that made Dickens’s serialized novels the Sopranos of the 19th century. “This is what people would talk about from one week to the next,” says Linda Paulson, continuing studies associate dean and director of the master of liberal arts program and a specialist in Victorian novels. “People chewed over the red herrings Dickens left behind each week, and his tense endings.”
Londoners in the 1860s shelled out two pence every week for the continuing saga. Stanford’s serialization, on the other hand, is free to anyone who requests it. The project has a host of producers and supporting players, including the continuing studies program, the Stanford Alumni Association, University communications, and the drama and English departments. Stanford Libraries’ special collections will provide period illustrations by F.W. Pailthorpe and Marcus Stone.
Paulson, whose parents read Dickens to her when she was a child, thinks today’s families might be looking for a similar experience. With the popularity of the Harry Potter books, she adds, “kids have proved to their parents over the last couple of years that they can sit still and listen to a fairly complicated story.”
Stanford’s printed version of Great Expectations uses a green cover similar to that of Dickens’s journal and a facsimile of the original typeface. “But,” Paulson notes, “we’re blowing up the size for 21st-century eyes.”
