Did Dickens fall on hard times? Now you can study his accounts for degree
AS Charles Dickens’s Mr Micawber famously observed, if your outgoings are greater than your income then the result is misery.
Now students on the world’s first Dickens master’s degree by research can study whether the author lived according to his character’s maxim.
On the course, students can access more than 500,000 artefacts relating to his life, including bank statements, and see if he abided by Mr Micawber’s advice to a young David Copperfield: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness.
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.”
The University of Buckingham has joined up with the Charles Dickens Museum in Holborn to offer the £7,860, one-year course, which is the world’s first MA in Dickens studies by research. At the end, students will produce a 20,000-word dissertation on an original research topic.
Dickens’s great-great-great granddaughter Lucinda Hawksley will give a seminar, and students will be based in Dickens’s old house in Doughty Street, which is now the museum. It was there that Dickens, who died in 1870, wrote The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby. Mr Micawber appeared in Dickens’s eighth novel David Copperfield. He is said to have been based on Dickens’s own father who, like the character, was incarcerated in debtors’ prison.
The first 10 students have recently started the course. John Drew, the University of Buckingham professor of English who co-runs the programme, said: “By the end of the year we will have 10 dissertations pushing the boundaries in 10 different ways, like small flashbulbs illuminating new areas.”
Students can map Dickens’s income and expenditure with what he was writing at the corresponding time because he published his novels in instalments. One student is analysing his accounts with the bank Coutts.
Professor Drew said Dickens’s expenses in the latter period of his life were substantial, partly because he had separated from his wife and was paying for a house in London for her and one of his sons, and also supporting his mistress Nelly Ternan.
Other archive items that students have so far examined include a scrapbook of obituaries about Dickens, a deck of cards featuring Dickensian characters, believed to be used for one of the early versions of the card game Snap, and a cryptic letter from Dickens to the artist George Cruikshank, discussing the details for one of the illustrations to Oliver Twist.
One student has already discovered an unpublished letter from Dickens inside a book from a secondhand shop. Professor Drew said: “There is a genuine excitement in the room as we watch the students handle these rare materials.”