There is an extra C19 event taking place on Wednesday 18th May at 4.15pm in MB3202 (refreshments served from 4pm). Dr Julian North from the University of Leicester will talk to us on ‘Portraits for the People: Dickens’s Public Image’.

 

All are welcome.

 

Please find Dr. North’s abstract and biography below:

 

 

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Dr Julian North, University of Leicester

‘Portraits for the People: Dickens’s Public Image’

 

This talk will explore visual images of Dickens’s in print media in the 1830s and 40s. I will be looking at portraits of Dickens by Daniel Maclise, Margaret Gillies, Alfred D’Orsay and others, in  frontis pieces, prints and the periodical press, as well as more eccentric forms such as the ‘Bijou English Almanac’ of 1842. I’ll be situating these images in the context of challenges to aristocratic portraiture at the period (including Dickens’s own scathing remarks on the subject), and asking how these images positioned him in relation to his public.  To what extent was Dickens made, visually, into a man of the people?

Julian North is a senior lecturer in nineteenth-century literature in the School of English, University of Leicester. She specialises in biography and authorial afterlives and has published on the work of Thomas De Quincey, Carlyle, Jane Austen and Mary Shelley, and Charlotte Bronte, amongst others. She is the author of The Domestication of Genius: Biography and the Romantic Poet (Oxford University Press, 2009) and one of the editors of The Works of Thomas De Quincey (Pickering and Chatto, 2000-2003), gen. ed. Grevel Lindop. She is currently working on Victorian author portraits.