Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend: a new digital reading experiment
Project will publish the novel in its original monthly instalments
The free, online journal 19, published by Birkbeck will be launching an exciting new digital reading project on 1 May 2014. The project will take Our Mutual Friend, Dickens’s last completed novel before his death, and release it in the original monthly instalments from May 2014 to November 2015, to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the novel’s original serialised publication (1864-1865). The project launches the celebrations for 19’s ten-year anniversary in November 2015.
Dr Ben Winyard, who is organising the online Dickens project says: “Our Mutual Friend is widely accepted as one of Dickens’s greatest novels. It demonstrates a sophistication of imagery, ideas and storytelling that we hope to bring to a new audience of readers through our project.
“Dickens was a master of the serialised novel, creating tantalising cliff-hangers that left readers waiting eagerly for the next instalment, just as today we wait for and discuss the next episode of Homeland or Breaking Bad. Although the novel is available as a single tome, this project will enable us to recapture the original reading experience.”
Alongside each monthly instalment of 32 pages, Dickens experts from across the world will contribute blog posts, which will explore the themes in each instalment.
The online project will use high-resolution scans of the original instalments, so that readers experience the novel as it was originally published. Each instalment came in what was known as ‘the wrapper’ – dozens of pages of advertisements. Dr Winyard says: “150 years ago, as the novel was being published, the age of mass advertising was just beginning. Being able to see the instalments within the original wrapper, with its adverts for moustache wax and crinolines, conjures up an image of the world the original reader lived in.”
To take part in the Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend project, visit dickensourmutualfriend.wordpress.com and follow @DickensOMF on Twitter and on Facebook.