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Join Penguin author and Arts Society lecturer Ed Glinert on this FREE tour of Charles Dickens's Manchester.It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.
Manchester in the early Victorian period was the commercial heart of the North-West, the industrial heart of the world’s greatest empire, a city of culture, power and glory, a city alive with the greatest figures of the age: Wellington and Peel, Disraeli and Gladstone, Tennyson and of course Charles Dickens.
Britain’s most celebrated novelist came to the growing industrial metropolis of Manchester 19 times, taking the platform at a fund-raiser in October 1843 for the Athenaeum alongside such reformers and notables as Benjamin Disraeli and Richard Cobden; partying with his pal and fellow novelist Harrison Ainsworth; and visiting his sister in then desirable Ardwick.
He based the character of the crippled Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol on the son of a friend who owned an Ardwick cotton mill. Local industrialists the Grant Brothers, William and Daniel, were the prototypes for the Cheeryble brothers in Nicholas Nickleby.
Yet Dickens produced only one work on the Industrial Revolution – Hard Times (1854). The novel is set in a mythical Coketown, possibly Manchester but also based on Preston. Though not one of his better works, it is worth reading for its descriptions of working-class life.
He also spoke at and acted in the Free Trade Hall and was the guest of honour at the opening of the Free Library in 1852.
We will visit the haunts of those he met and knew, stop by at the locations he might just recognise today, and drop into the elegant Portico Library where the catalogue in the 1840s was organised by his friend James Crossley.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Manchester, United Kingdom
Tickets
GBP 0