Daily News Channel
With the exception of Madame Defarge, the vengeful knitter of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, needlework has never been the most revolutionary of pursuits. Slow, laborious and meditative, it’s everything contemporary culture is not
Not many people know that Charles Dickens was an actor as well as a writer. A workaholic who was haunted by memories of his impoverished childhood, when he worked in a blacking factory, Dickens was never the most emotionally stable of men at the best of times, never mind at the worst. In 1857 his friend Wilkie Collins wrote a play about a failed Arctic expedition.