This weekend I’ll be delivering my first public lecture, at the Orlando Public Library. I’m participating in their “What the Dickens” event, a year-long celebration of Charles Dickens. The timing is apt: I just returned from Dickens Universe, a yearly event in Santa Cruz for both scholars and the public. And right before that I
Tomorrow morning I leave North Carolina, where I’ve spent the last three weeks talking about “the construction of childhood in words and images” at the National Humanities Center, and head back to Florida via Columbia, SC, where the Children’s Literature Association annual conference is held this year. It’s a wonderful conference (though you don’t have
In the 1820s and 1830s, James Kendrew published a series of chapbooks for children. Most of these are stories about Simple Simon, or Jack Spratt, or Tom Thumb, but one is “The Little Maid and the Gentleman; or, We Are Seven.” Kendrew reprints Wordsworth’s poem, adding the new title and including woodcuts for each stanza.