The University of Massachusetts Lowellcq today announced plans to celebrate Charles Dickens’s 200th birthday with seven months of events, beginning at the end of March. Dickens was born on this day in 1812cq.
The university said the “Dickens in Lowell”cq program will be the largest celebration of Dickens’s birthday in New England and will be among the largest in country. The events will include performances, speakers, and an exhibit on the author’s 1842cq visit to Lowell.
“After this trip we see a new vigor and complexity in his writing and a heightened social consciousness. America changed him. He began to see that his role as a pop culture hero came with great accountability,” the exhibit’s website says. “It is no coincidence that the year after he returned home, he published his iconic ‘Christmas Carol’, a tale of radical transformation and social responsibility.”
