Tag: charles dickens

New in the collection: Dickens festival pinback

 

Pinback button for the first Dickens fair in Raleigh. The button includes an image of a young man wearing a 19th century cap and with a red scarf around his neck.

“Clothing designers sent the grunge look down runways for spring, but thanks to the Dickens Fair, Raleigh will be full of fashionables sporting their own brand of street-urchin wear next weekend.

“Fayetteville Street Mall will be transformed into Victorian England for the street fair celebrating of one of the world’s most celebrated writers.

“Dickens Pen & Inc. — an outgrowth of the Dickens Disciples, kind of a Charles Dickens fan club organized by N.C. State University adjunct English professor Elliot Engel — is offering an incentive: Anyone dressed in period costume gets into the fair free.”

–From “A Dickens of a Dress Code” by Mary E. Miller in the News & Observer (Dec. 4, 1992)

The Dickens Fair ran annually until 1999.

DC antislavery petition ignites NC congressman

“Public opinion! What class of men have an immense preponderance over the
rest of the community, in their power of representing public opinion in the
legislature? The slave­ owners. They send from their 12 States 100 members,
while the 14 free States, with a free population nearly double, return but
142. Before whom do the presidential candidates bow down the most humbly,
on whom do they fawn the most fondly, and for whose tastes do they cater
the most assiduously in their servile protestations? The slave­owners
always.

“Public opinion! Hear the public opinion of the free South, as expressed by
its own members in the House of Representatives at Washington. ‘I have a
great respect for the chair,’ quoth North Carolina, ‘I have a great
respect for the chair as an officer of the House, and a great respect for
him personally; nothing but that respect prevents me from rushing to the
table and tearing that petition which has just been presented for the
abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, to pieces.’­ ”

— From “American Notes for General Circulation” by Charles Dickens (lightly edited)

North Carolina had 13 representatives during Dickens’s 1842 visit — I’m not finding which of them so respectfully restrained himself.