We are delighted to host the launch of OCLW Visiting Scholar Helena Kelly’s new book The Life and Lies of Charles Dickens (2023).

Dickens is known for his walks through the seamier London neighbourhoods but in this discussion we’ll follow him elsewhere, to the towns around the River Medway where he lived both as a child and an adult, and some of the routes he trod and compulsively re-trod throughout his life and writing career. Join Dickens biographer Helena Kelly and Charlie Lee-Potter, whose writing and multimedia work explores ways of moving through the landscape, as they retrace Dickens’s footsteps, and those of his characters, encountering Medway native and sometime resident Nelly Ternan, discovering unexpected juxtapositions, and revealing patterns of longing and belonging.

Helena will have copies of the book to sell and sign after the talk.