2012 is the year of Charles Dickens. The bicentenary of the writer’s birth is February 7, but the festivities are taking place all year long. Hundreds of exhibits, film screenings, walking tours, and more are featured in the Events Calendar on Dickens2012.com. Plus, bibliophiles can follow along on Twitter for bicentenary-related news.

Many of the events are happening in the UK, from a read-along of Oliver Twist in Portsmouth, where Dickens was born, to a Christmas market where characters from his novels will mingle with revelers in the town of Rochester, near where he lived the last years of his life.

The Charles Dickens Museum in London (left) is celebrating the author’s birthday with a dinner at the Mansion House, the home and office of the Lord Mayor of London. The evening’s agenda includes a sherry reception, three-course dinner, and Dickensian entertainment led by actor Sir Patrick Stewart. Details: February 7, 6:45-10:30 p.m., £120 per person.

The Museum is also hosting a Dickens Reading Group to explore the writer’s works and those of his Victorian-era contemporaries. The first twelve-week session kicks off Thursday, February 17, and takes place at the atmospheric museum, Dickens’ only surviving London residence.

Other festivities around the world include an exhibit, “The Mysteries of Charles Dickens (1812-1870),” at the Museum Strauhof in Zurich, Switzerland, and the “Dickens Heritage Tour” in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, where he often holidayed. Fans in Houston, Texas, have come up with an unusual idea–a half-marathon especially for Dickens enthusiasts. For details on these and other events, visit Dickens2012.org.

[Images of the author © Charles Dickens Museum]

“Lady Russell, convinced that Anne would not be allowed to be of any use, or any importance, in the choice of the house which they were going to secure, was very unwilling to have her hurried away so soon, and wanted to make it possible for her to stay behind till she might convey her to Bath herself after Christmas,” wrote Jane Austen in Persuasion, one of two novels for which she used the English spa town as a backdrop.

Literary travelers conveying themselves to Bath this month will find the Jane Austen Centre especially festive. The exhibit “Jane Austen’s Regency Christmas” illustrates how the holiday was celebrated in the Georgian period. For some additional good cheer, samples of mulled wine and Mrs. Austen’s plum pudding are offered. The exhibit runs through December 31.

Crafty Janeites can try their hand at making an Austen-inspired Christmas ornament. For everyone else, the Jane Austen Centre online gift shop (which ships worldwide) has a terrific selection of gifts, including pre-made ornaments, tea accessories, the ever-popular “I Love Mr. Darcy” tote bag, and a silver charm for fans of Northanger Abbey, the other novel Austen set in Bath.

[photo on right ©Jane Austen Centre]

Mark Twain's parlor decked out for the holidays.

Make it a double header this weekend and visit both Mark Twain‘s mansion and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abode, which are right next door to each other in Hartford, Connecticut. Among the festivities at the Victorian-themed “Stowe & Twain’s Olde-Fashioned Christmas” extravaganza are crafts, caroling, and horse-drawn carriage rides around the historic Nook Farm neighborhood that was a popular dwelling place for writers and publishers in the 1800s.

The Olde-Fashioned Christmas takes place Saturday, December 10, and Sunday, December 11, from noon to 4 p.m. The activities are free. There is an admission charge for tours of the houses adorned in holiday finery, looking as they would have when the writers were in residence. If you prefer a different take, also on December 10 at the Mark Twain House is a separate event at 2 p.m.: the Winter Solstice Steampunk Christmas Tea.

[Photo ©westernconnecticut.blogspot.com]

Advance reservations are strongly suggested. Included with admission for reserved tickets is 10% off in the Orchard House gift shop. For the bibliophiles on your gift list, we suggest a Mood Pillow. The stylish throw pillow, a recreation of one owned by Louisa May Alcott, has a dual use: mood indicator. If it stood on end, the writer wanted to socialize; if it lay flat it was best to stay away.

Also available are t-shirts for literary kids with the tag line “Little Women Grow Up to Be Great Women” and one for grown-ups sporting a quote by Louisa May Alcott: “The emerging woman …will be strong minded, strong hearted, strong souled, and strong bodied…”

Richmond residents can get a head start on Halloween festivities at the Poe Museum’s last Unhappy Hour of the season tomorrow, October 27 (6-9 p.m.). Head back to the museum (left) on Saturday for Poe’s Pumpkin Patch, a party for readers of all ages. Among the activities on the agenda are pumpkin decorating, a “Black Cat” pinata, and a mummy-wrapping contest inspired by one of Poe’s stories. The museum encourages attendees to bring along the kids, especially if you want to “make sure [they] grow up weird.” Now there’s an invitation that might be hard to refuse. Entry to the extravaganza is included with regular museum admission.

If you’d like to find out “how Halloween is an ideal time of year to celebrate the works of Edgar Allan Poe,” stop by the National Historic Site dedicated to the writer in Philadelphia. At 2 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, October 29 and 30, a park ranger will lead the 45-minute illustrated presentation at Poe’s former abode, and on Friday, October 28, the themed talk will take place at the Portrait Gallery in the Second Bank of the United States at Independence National Historical Park, also at 2 p.m.

In Baltimore this Sunday, October 30 (6-9 p.m.), is Poe’s Frightful Halloween at Westminster Hall, with a dramatic reading of “A Monkey’s Paw,” a costume contest, and more. Admission is $10 for adults, $3 for kids 12 and under. Proceeds are going to the Poe House and Museum, which has had its funding cut by the city of Baltimore and is in danger of closing its doors for good. Also in support of the historic landmark is The Spirit of Poe anthology, coming from Literary Landmark Press the first week in November.

New Yorkers will have to wait a little longer to visit the recently-refurbished Poe Cottage in the Bronx. The New York Times article “Poe’s Cottage, Weak and Weary No More” has the run-down on the house and a newly-constructed, imaginative visitor center.

Midwesterners can join our friend and fellow literary traveler Gary Wyatt this Friday, October 28 (7-9 p.m.) at Belmont Vineyards & Winery in Leasburg, Missouri, where he’ll be reading “The Raven” and other Poe tales. Cheers to that.

Theodore Dreiser’s tale is the story of a young girl who leaves behind life in rural Wisconsin to seek fame and fortune in Chicago, becoming a wealthy man’s mistress and later a celebrated actress. Now hailed as a classic, Sister Carrie was considered scandalous when it was published in 1900. Thirty years after it initially appeared in print, Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis declared, “Dreiser’s great first novel…came to housebound and airless America like a great free Western wind, and to our stuffy domesticity gave us the first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman.”

Margie has created a self-guided walking tour of Sister Carrie sites in Chicago, from the department stores where the titular character seeks employment to the locale of a clandestine meeting with a suitor. So, Windy City residents and visitors, if you’re up for a literary trek through the city, check out the tour on The Bookstore’s blog: justthebookstore.blogspot.com.

The 30th annual Banned Books Week (September 23 – October 1), sponsored by the American Library Association, is in full swing with events and displays at libraries and bookstores across the country, along with a Virtual Read-out. Bibliophiles are invited to create videos of themselves reading from their favorite banned or challenged book and post it to the Banned Books Week channel.

The list of challenged books runs wide and deep, from contemporary tales such as Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants to classics like James Joyce’s Ulysses. The Irish writer’s novel might not have made it into print if it weren’t for Sylvia Beach, the original proprietor of the famed Parisian bookshop Shakespeare and Company and confidante and champion of expatriate writers. In 1922, she published Ulysses—controversial in part for its use of “dirty words” and sexual content—at her own expense. Another friend and loyal customer, Ernest Hemingway, aided Beach in having the book smuggled into the United States, where it was banned.

On display at the James Joyce Museum and Tower at Sandycove Point on the southern edge of Dublin Bay, a 40-foot granite tower where the scribe once stayed and later set the opening scene of Ulysses, is a rare early copy of the notorious tale illustrated by Henri Matisse.

[Photo © Dublin Tourism/VisitDublin.com]

Regardless of when you visit the Twin Cities, the St. Paul Public Library makes it easy to follow in the writer’s footsteps with the free F.  Scott Fitzgerald in St. Paul Homes and Haunts self-guided walking tour. Highlights include the scribe’s birthplace at 481  Laurel Avenue and the Romanesque-style brownstone at 599 Summit (right), where he spent the summer of 1919 sequestered in a top-floor room in his parents’ apartment working on his first novel. (Both buildings are privately occupied and can only be viewed from the outside.) When Fitzgerald received word Scribner’s had made an offer on the book, he quit his job as a railroad laborer and trumpeted his literary news. “That day I quit work and ran along the streets,” he recalled, “stopping automobiles to tell friends and acquaintances about it—my novel, This Side of Paradise, was accepted for publication.”

On display in the F. Scott Fitzgerald Reading Alcove at the Central Library branch (90 West Fourth Street) is a small collection of
items related to the writer. Located in nearby Rice Park is a statue (above left) of Fitzgerald.

Tony Summit Avenue has another literary connection. Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis once rented a house at number 516 in late 1917.
He intended to write about robber baron and railway magnate James J. Hill (referenced by Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby), whose red sandstone
mansion at 240 Summit gave the street the epithet “Avenue of the Barons.”

The Paris Wife by Paula McClain

Ernest Hemingway’s closest companion during his now-famous years in Paris in the 1920s was his first wife, Hadley Richardson, who makes brief appearances in his memoir A Moveable Feast. Hadley was 28 when she met Hemingway at a mutual friend’s party in Chicago. Nearly a decade older than the aspiring writer, pretty yet plain, educated but far from worldly, she seems an unlikely match for the handsome, charming, dynamic Hemingway. After a whirlwind courtship the two marry and set sail for Europe. In The Paris Wife, Paula McClain recounts their years in Jazz Age Paris mingling with the likes of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald before their marriage comes apart.

A Good Hard Look by Ann Napolitano

Stricken with lupus at age twenty-five, Flannery O’Connor left New York City and returned to her family’s ancestral farm, Andalusia, in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she devoted herself to writing and raising peacocks, swans, chickens, and other birds. In Ann Napolitano’s novel, O’Connor’s quiet existence at Andalusia is broken up when she strikes up a friendship with the married Melvin Whiteson. He came to Milledgeville to start a new chapter in his life, but when he meets Flannery—who despite her illness is vibrantly alive—he starts to question the choices he has made.

[photos © Paris Tourist Office, David Lefranc; Flannery O'Connor Andalusia Foundation]