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Dickens: The Last Decade

In the last ten years of his life Charles Dickens related to his adoring public in a number of different ways; as novelist, as journalist, as public speaker, and in public readings of his own work.

Crime in Fiction: Defoe and Dickens to Spark, Highsmith and McEwan

Why did stories of criminals become irresistible for novelists? Starting...

Amelia Dyer was one of the most prolific murderers in Victorian Britain. She made a living as a “baby farmer”, or someone paid to care for unwanted or abandoned infants – except she killed around 400 of them. How could a mother and nurse murder so many defenceless babies?

Offensive Shakespeare

From The Merchant of Venice to The Taming of the Shrew, it’s easy to see how Shakespeare’s plays can cause offence to contemporary audiences. Is it harder to teach Shakespeare today than in the past? Have ideas about what is offensive in Shakespeare changed over time?

The Man Who Invented Christmas: Film Adaptations of Dickens' A Christmas Carol

How do the different versions reflect the politics and culture of their own particular times? What makes a good Carol movie? Is it truth to the original or is it something else?

Freedom Song: The Fisk Jubilee Singers' Story

A choir of ex-slaves, raising funds to build their University, toured America from 1871, suffering discrimination and hardship.

The Mathematical World of C. L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll)

This illustrated lecture and book launch will attempt to answer these questions by outlining his mathematical life, labours and legacy in the context of Victorian Oxford.