“A loving heart is the truest wisdom." Help us share Dickens’s wisdom with students.
Charles Dickens didn’t just tell great stories—he changed the way we tell them. He coined words like butterfingers, boredom, and flummoxed. Beyond that, he wrote stories with great social impact that both entertained and stirred readers toward hope, compassion, and justice. He used humor to shine light on important issues of his time. His epitaph reads, "He was a sympathizer with the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest writers is lost to the world.”
At the Dickens Project, we believe that Dickens’s work is just as important now as it was in his lifetime, and with your help, we can help inspire students to discover how Dickens can illuminate their own worlds.
The Dickens Day of Writing is a national program held on Dickens’s birthday. It brings together junior and senior high school students from all over the country to participate in a writing retreat, which offers the chance to have their work published. For many students, this opportunity is life-changing.
This past year, we heard from teachers who witnessed firsthand the difference this program made in their classrooms. Ray Crosby from Kern Valley High School in Lake Isabella, California, told us:
"I’m one of four English faculty members. The community is very poor, very white, very rural, very conservative… We had a lot of kids who lived with grandparents, a lot in foster homes, a lot who are classified as homeless students…a couple of kids on [probation]… My first year on the job, we had five seniors graduate and go on to college out of 110. I think about Dickens…these aren’t London street urchins, but these are the kind of people Dickens is writing about. It’s a community where everyone wants to learn—they just need to be inspired. They can identify with Pip’s class anxiety [and his] quest for upward mobility. These are students who realize there is more out there than the hand they’ve been dealt. They want to learn things that they haven’t been exposed to yet. [After the Dickens Day of Writing], we have these nice bound copies where 23 of my kids are now published authors—that’s life-changing for a lot of them."
For students at Kern Valley High School and elsewhere, we have been able to pair them with mentors in higher education to support them not just in their writing endeavors, but in their pursuit of education beyond high school. Your donation will help us expand our reach to new schools, publish the fifth volume of student essays, and supply annotated texts for students to work with.
We believe that Dickens’s legacy belongs in the hands of our students. As Dickens wrote, “A loving heart is the truest wisdom.” Today, we invite you to help us share that wisdom with young readers and writers discovering the power of their own voices.
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