The Department of English in the Faculty of Humanities needs additional volunteer readers for the international, 24 hour sponsored read-a-thon of Charles Dickens’s novel Great Expectations, in aid of the University’s campaign for the Centre for Cancer Immunology.
The event, which will take place over the weekend of 14 – 15 January 2017, will be launched with a reading by Dickens’s great-great grand-daughter, Kate Dickens, and aims to raise at least £2000.
Volunteers are being sought from across the University and beyond: staff and students, families and friends are all welcome. The only requirement is that you are willing to contribute by reading aloud a chapter or small section of the novel, in any language including English.
The event is being organised by Dickens scholar Professor Mary Hammond, who commented:
A Dickens charity read-a-thon makes perfect sense. We are a global University, and Dickens was an international phenomenon; Great Expectations itself has been translated into almost 50 languages that we know of, from Arabic to Yiddish.
Dickens also devoted a lot of his life to charitable causes; if he was alive today he would no doubt be the first to step forward to read a chapter of his own novel aloud, and would probably stay for the whole weekend to cheer the rest of us on.
If you are willing to read a chapter or section of the novel aloud in any language at this event, or you would like further information, please contact Professor Hammond by email: [email protected]
You can also sponsor the campaign through the event’s Just Giving page.
