Mon, Dec 19
|Washington
Profs & Pints: How Dickens "Invented" Christmas
Only an unrepentant Scrooge would say “bah humbug” to this evening with Professor John Pfordresher, who, along with extensively researching and teaching Charles Dickens, curated his university library's 2012 exhibition, “Dickens at Georgetown.”
Time & Location
Dec 19, 2022, 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM
Washington, 801 E St NW, Washington, DC 20004, USA
About the event
Profs and Pints DC presents: “How Dickens ‘Invented’ Christmas,” with John Pfordresher, an emeritus professor of English at Georgetown University who has taught courses on Charles Dickens for more than 50 years.
Only an unrepentant Scrooge would say “bah humbug” to this evening with Professor John Pfordresher, who, along with extensively researching and teaching Charles Dickens, curated his university library's 2012 exhibition, “Dickens at Georgetown.”
We'll start our scholarly journey through time in December of 1843, just before a Christmas past. Chapman and Hall published a deluxe Christmas book by Dickens titled A Christmas Carol. Bound in cloth, with gilt edges, four color engravings and four more black-and-white wood cuts, and priced at a relatively low five shillings, it sold 6,000 copies before Christmas Eve. Critical response was largely rhapsodic. The already celebrated satirist William Makepeace Thackeray described the book as “a national benefit and to every man or woman…