Professor David Peimer
Charles Dickens: Sentimentalist or Social Commentator?
Summary
In this lecture we look at whether Charles Dickens was a sentimentalist or social commentator, looking specifically at ‘Oliver Twist’, ‘Great Expectations’, and ‘A Tale of Two Cities’. We will also question if his stories and characters still fascinate today.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
Yes. I think that he under, because he also was in a workhouse, as I said, he knew these worlds. I don’t think he was glorifying them, but he knew the underbelly of this Victorian industrialised society in the home front. You know, others wrote about, you know, Conrad, but they wrote about England going out conquering the world, but he was writing, well what’s happening in our backyard.