The Classic Mystery Collection - Arthur Conan Doyle [34]
The Charles Dickens Centre in Eastgate House, Rochester, closed in 2004, but the garden containing the author's Swiss chalet is still open. The 16th-Century house, which appeared as Westgate House in The Pickwick Papers and the Nun's House in Edwin Drood, will probably re-open under a related use. The city's annual Dickens Festival (summer) and Dickensian Christmas celebrations continue unaffected.
The Dickens World themed attraction, covering 71500 square feet, and including a cinema and restaurants, opened in Chatham on 25 May 2007. It stands on a small part of the site of the former naval dockyard where Dickens's father had once worked in the Navy Pay Office.
Dickens Festival in Rochester, Kent. Summer Dickens is held at the end of May or in the first few days of June, it commences with an invitation only ball on the Thursday and then continues with street entertainment, and many costumed characters, on the Friday, Saturday and Sunday.Christmas Dickens is the first weekend in December- Saturday and Sunday only.
Dickens festivals are also held across the world.
Three notable ones in the United States are:
The Riverside Dickens Festival in Riverside, California, includes literary studies as well as entertainments.
The Great Dickens Christmas Fair (http://www.dickensfair.com/) has been held in San Francisco, California, since the 1970s. During the four or five weekends before Christmas, over 500 costumed performers mingle with and entertain thousands of visitors amidst the recreated full-scale blocks of Dickensian London in over 90,000 square feet of public area. This is the oldest, largest, and most successful of the modern Dickens festivals outside England. Many (including the Martin Harris who acts in the Rochester festival and flies out from London to play Scrooge every year in SF) say it is the most impressive in the world.
Dickens on The Strand in Galveston, Texas, is a holiday festival held on the first weekend in December since 1974, where bobbies, Beefeaters and the "Queen" herself are on hand to recreate the Victorian London of Charles Dickens. Many festival volunteers and attendees dress in Victorian attire and bring the world of Dickens to life.
Notable works by Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens published over a dozen major novels, a large number of short stories (including a number of Christmas-themed stories), a handful of plays, and several nonfiction books. Dickens's novels were initially serialized in weekly and monthly magazines, then reprinted in standard book formats.
Novels
The Pickwick Papers (Monthly serial, April 1836 to November 1837)
The Adventures of Oliver Twist (Monthly serial in Bentley's Miscellany, February 1837 to April 1839)
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (Monthly serial, April 1838 to October 1839)
The Old Curiosity Shop (Weekly serial in Master Humphrey's Clock, April 25, 1840, to February 6, 1841)
Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty (Weekly serial in Master Humphrey's Clock, February 13, 184l, to November 27, 1841)
The Christmas books: A Christmas Carol (1843)
The Chimes (1844)
The Cricket on the Hearth (1845)
The Battle of Life (1846)
The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848)
The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (Monthly serial, January 1843 to July 1844)
Dombey and Son (Monthly serial, October 1846 to April 1848)
David Copperfield (Monthly serial, May 1849 to November 1850)
Bleak House (Monthly serial, March 1852 to September 1853)
Hard Times: For These Times (Weekly serial in Household Words, April 1, 1854, to August 12, 1854)
Little Dorrit (Monthly serial, December 1855 to June 1857)
A Tale of Two Cities (Weekly serial in All the Year Round, April 30, 1859, to November 26, 1859)
Great Expectations (Weekly serial in All the Year Round, December 1, 1860 to August 3, 1861)
Our Mutual Friend (Monthly serial, May 1864 to November 1865)
No Thoroughfare (1867) (with Wilkie Collins)
The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Monthly serial, April 1870 to September 1870. Only six of