Famous works and characters of Charles Dickens have come to life at an exhibition put together by the students of the department of English and modern European languages at the Lucknow University to mark the bicentenary celebrations of the novelist.
With over a hundred posters describing the various aspects of Charles Dickens like and works, the two-day exhibition is a result of the efforts made by the first year students of BA English honours.
Ghazala Khan, a student of the department, said “The exhibition gave us a chance to learn much more about Dickens — something beyond the text books — because we did a lot of research. This has been the most exciting part of our learning process.”
Another student, Vaishali Pandey, said that Charles Dickens was now closer to their hearts than their minds. “We learn from books using our brains but when we started working on the exhibition, we did it from the heart and Charles Dickens has found a permanent place in our hearts,” she said.
Charles Dickens was born on 7th February, 1812 and died on 9th June 1820 and lived a life of incessant writing aptly making him the best of the novelists of the Victorian era, one that would be studied and eulogised for the next 200 years
Dickens, whose works have been collectively made in to well over a 100 movies in the days of silent cinema alone, is known for his vivid characters whose lines read like a movie screening.
His characters were often so memorable that they took on a life of their own outside his books. Gamp became a slang expression for an umbrella from the character Mrs Gamp and Pickwickian, Pecksniffian, and Gradgrind all entered dictionaries due to Dickens’s original portraits of such characters who were quixotic, hypocritical, or vapidly factual.
In a career spanning 20 years, he wrote 15 novels, 5 novellas and hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed extensively.