‘I so shaped out my walk’: Charles Dickens’s perambulatory patterns
Tuesday 14 November, 2-3:30pm
The Buttery, Wolfson College
Free event
We are delighted to host the launch of OCLW Visiting Scholar Helena Kelly's new book The Life and Lies of Charles Dickens (2023).
Dickens is known for his walks through the seamier London neighbourhoods but in this discussion we’ll follow him elsewhere, to the towns around the River Medway where he lived both as a child and an adult, and some of the routes he trod and compulsively re-trod throughout his life and writing career. Join Dickens biographer Helena Kelly and Charlie Lee-Potter, whose writing and multimedia work explores ways of moving through the landscape, as they retrace Dickens’s footsteps, and those of his characters, encountering Medway native and sometime resident Nelly Ternan, discovering unexpected juxtapositions, and revealing patterns of longing and belonging.
Helena will have copies of the book to sell and sign after the talk.
Dr Helena Kelly is a former academic, author of The Life and Lies of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen, the Secret Radical. She is currently a visiting scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life Writing, where she is pursuing her work on a new life of the Victorian writer Elizabeth Gaskell.
Dr Charlie Lee-Potter is a writer, lecturer, artist and journalist - and OCLW Workshop Facilitator. As the former presenter of BBC Radio 4 programmes such as PM, The World at One, Open Book and The World This Weekend, Charlie has a particular interest in the combination of found sound and the written word.