Rediscovering Dickens

A chronicle of the transcription of 20 issues of Household Words by Charles Dickens. http://household.umkc.edu

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Location: Kansas City, Missouri, United States

I'm working on a pet project to digitize all of the issues of Charles Dickens's weekly magazine, Household Words, that contained portions of his novel Hard Times. Since OCR software is expensive, I'm transcribing all of 20 issues by hand. Since I am actually interested in what I am typing (and am therefore reading as I go), and I not the speediest of typists, this will take me a little while. This blog will chronicle my progress and my thoughts about the project and its content along the way. Why should you care? If you are at all interested in how popular culture evolves, how the middle class came to be, and how literature is affected within and without its context, you should read on. If you couldn't care less of such things, then you might want to go elsewhere. Thanks for visiting - I hope you will return. - Lynn

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

One of this week's articles, From California, introduced me to the town of Salmon Falls, El Dorado, California. The article appears to be penned by a gold prospector who goes into great detail about the many types of people and products that fill the village. This article reminded me of a couple of things. First, even though the town is in California, and the article in no way references shady outlaw types, I couldn't help but think of Deadwood. I've only seen a few episodes of that show, but I know that the main "good guy" character owns a store, much like the one described in this article. I also know that there is a pretty notorious population of "Chinamen" in Deadwood, just like in Salmon Falls.

The other thing I was reminded of was The Great Gatsby, specifically, a phenomenon I heard about a long time ago wherein retail stores stack piles of goods in front of their customers, almost to excess - the person describing this phenomenon called it "Gastbying." A quick Google search turned up nothing on this term, but I believe it's an accurate term for the type of displays popularized by The Gap in the 1980s, and now found everywhere from Abercrombie and Fitch to Target. The way the author describes the goods in his store and the colors of the clothes of the locals is almost Gatsbying them - romanticizing them to the point of an unatainable dream.

The town of Salmon Falls in El Dorado county, California did actually exist, and is now a ghost town near a popular hiking trail.

Read more about Salmon Falls here and here.

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