The Read-a-Thon

On February 7, the actual Dickens bi-centenary, Dickens 2012 project director Anna Dever wanted to do something extra special. It would have to be something all-encompassing, it would have to be international and it would have to do with what made Dickens most special – his books.

“I wanted to do something to show how many countries were involved. We were just joking around at first thinking what we could do. And we decided to do a reading, just a complete variety of people from different places coming together to read Dickens. I thought it summed up what I wanted to do with the project and to celebrate the kind of wide appeal of Dickens,” she says.

The response was tremendous. Schoolchildren in Ukraine read A Haunted Man. Actress and Dickens aficionado Miriam Margolyes thrilled with an excerpt from Dombey & Son in Australia. Some 10 Malaysians did a mash-up of a popular scene from The Pickwick Papers. Korea scored the “Please sir, I want some more,” from Oliver Twist. Little Nell expired in what is probably one of the most famous death scenes in literature in Japan. A Kazakh lady ‘bah humbug’ed her way through A Christmas Carol in the midst of a blizzard. A man read from Our Mutual Friend from a café in war-torn Damascus, Syria. And the 24-hours ended with a member of the British Council reading, perhaps appropriately from Hard Times in Iraq.

The readings, were pre-recorded in each country and sent to the British Council in five-minute installments which were uploaded to Twitter. “So on the hour, every hour on the bicentenary, we had a new reading posted which was only 5 minutes long and after that we pulled all the readings together into a highlights clip and then that evening we screened all the readings at the British Film Institute in London.”

What’s most amazing is that the whole thing was put together in less than two weeks. “It started out quite ambitious where I wanted to livestream everything and have it read at the exact times but it was impossible. So this was the next best thing. And the level of support we got from all the different countries was amazing. In such a short space of time they were able to go out and capture the readings, the majority of them in good quality.”

Dever tried to choose the more famous excerpts such as the introduction of A Tale of Two Cities, the death scene from A Curiosity Shop and “please sir, I want some more” from Oliver Twist. Those not familiar with the book, would probably remember that line from the musical.

“Greece wanted a political piece so we gave them a scene from Barnaby Rudge,” she says.

The Malaysian offering was especially good. It is a mash-up of different people of different backgrounds and ethnicities reading from Pickwick Papers. Grey Yeoh, the arts and programmes manager in Kuala Lumpur says they were aiming to showcase diversity.

“We had 10 or 11 people reading Pickwick Papers ranging from radio deejays to playwrights to writers to professional debaters and vocal trainers. We wanted to show not just different people but different backgrounds. So we had someone reading from a mamak stall, a radio station, a car, a Starbucks, a pantry, an apartment…”

The excerpt that Dever chose for Malaysia was the introduction of Samuel Weller, who went on to become arguably the most popular character in the Pickwick legend. Sam has a speech defect where he pronounces every “w” with a “v”. This made for some hilarious moments in the readings.

“It had the word ‘waggoner’ but because of the corruption of Sam’s accent, it was spelt ‘vagginer’. And the Malaysian readers were like, OK, of all the writings of Dickens, Malaysia got the one with ‘vagina’ in it? And they wondered how they were supposed to read it. And it was only later that the readers caught on to the fact that it was supposed to be ‘waggoner’ and not ‘vagina’,” Yeoh says with a chuckle.

Another thing people noted about the Malaysian clip was that every reader was using an electronic device, be it Kindle or iPad, rather than a book. “It was really interesting to see how the different people read. Some people, like those from Argentina, read from a dusty old book. And you guys had Kindles. So it was really a nice mixture,” Dever says.

That day, for the first time in its history, the British Council trended on Twitter. Dever remembers: “We got 20 to 30 million retweets and it got the coverage of the day. All the press in the UK was covering what was going on. We had an event at Westminster Abbey where Prince Charles and Camilla laid flowers on Dickens grave. The House of Parliament talked about Dickens work that day. I don’t think anybody knew how big it would be.”

Dickens is big in himself. But it would take an organisation with the reach of the British Council to put something of this magnitude together. “We exist in 110 countries around the world, and not necessarily only in the Commonwealth countries,” Yeoh points out.

What helped especially in this project is that so many countries wanted to be involved. So much so that it was impossible to accommodate them all. “We’ve got 70 different countries working on this Dickens 2012 project and the response has been insane. I received so many emails in February from unexpected countries saying, ‘we want to do the Dickens project, it relates to us so well.’”

Dickens, she points out, is in our contemporary subconscious. “Most people would have heard of Oliver Twist or A Christmas Carol. But it’s also interesting to see how much people have read. I spoke to someone from Uzbekistan who’s read all his books, and he just said, ‘yeah, it’s in the curriculum, that’s what we study’.

Just to give some context to that statement. Dickens wrote more than 30 books, fiction and non-fiction. If one were to do nothing except for read him end-to-end, it would take all of three months, according to biographer Peter Ackroyd who had to do just that. It is a daunting task and not one many people put themselves through.

The British Council has commissioned Electric Film, a company in the UK, which edited the readings, to put everything together with a round-up of everything that happened. The video is to be released online. Those who missed the readings can see it here at http://literature.britishcouncil.org/news/2012/january/readathon.