This summer is the 160th anniversary of a famous vacation: from June 11th to July 13th, 1857, Hans Christian Andersen sojourned with Charles Dickens and his family, at their home in Gad’s Hill. Dickens’s biographers tend to treat Andersen’s visit as something of a farce. Andersen was initially supposed to stay about a week, but he
The Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies conference is March 10-13, in Asheville, NC, and I’ll be presenting part of my current book project about the Victorians and the Walt Disney Company. The paper argues that literary and corporate periodization are analogous, each stemming from particular institutional objectives, and demonstrates the analogy by examining the history of