The Dickens Universe is a unique cultural event that brings together scholars, teachers, students, and members of the general public for a week of stimulating discussion and festive social activity on the beautiful Santa Cruz campus of the University of California—all focused on one or two Victorian novels, usually (but not always) one by Charles Dickens.

In 2024, the Dickens Universe will feature Great Expectations, which since its publication in 1860-61, has been one of Dickens’s best-loved and most widely read works.  The novel belongs to Pip, its narrator and main character – “No story in the first person was ever better told,” one of Dickens’s fellow Victorian novelists writes.  Pip tells us how his romantic, social, and economic ambitions drive him from his village home to the unsettling company of Miss Havisham and her beautiful ward Estella, to the busy, money-obsessed metropolis of London – and throughout, how his expectations seem as likely to result in emotional catastrophe as in greatness.  For all his drive toward self-creation, Pip reveals that he only becomes himself through connections to classes, institutions, lands, and populations outside him.  These connections are often barely visible and as likely to be defined by terror and violence as by care and attachment.  Much to his – and to the reader’s – surprise, those from whom he would most like to distance himself become most central to his self-definition.

Now in its 44th year of operation, the Dickens Universe combines features of a scholarly conference, a festival, a book club, and summer camp. Participants include people of all ages and walks of life—distinguished scholars, graduate students, undergraduates, retirees, young professionals, high school teachers, anyone who loves to read and who enjoys long Victorian novels.

Lura Johnson (Principal Pianist, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra) and Jason Rudy (Professor of English, University of Maryland) will offer a collaborative evening of music and poetry, reflecting on the ways nineteenth-century innovations in the world of music resonated with developments in British poetics. Staged as a conversation between a concert pianist and a scholar of poetry and poetics, the event will bring together musical performance, poetic recitation, and discussion of the extraordinary intersections of these two great art forms.