Rice professor named first fellow of Dickens House Museum
Patten receives honors for scholarship, research

BY JESSICA STARK
Rice News staff

While Rice is celebrating its centennial in 2012, the world will be honoring the bicentenary of Charles Dickens’ birth, and Rice professor Robert Patten will be in the heart of it all. Patten, the Lynette S. Autrey Professor in Humanities, was recently appointed the first fellow of the Dickens House Museum to serve as a scholar-in-residence where the Victorian novelist wrote portions of “Oliver Twist” and “Nicholas Nickleby.”

	ROBERT PATTEN

Patten was also recently chosen as a visiting fellow at the School of Advanced Study at the University of London, where he will research and write about anonymity among authors. Earlier this year he was elected a corresponding member of the English Association; he is one of only about 30 corresponding members of the association from the U.S. He was also awarded the opportunity to teach a Mellon Seminar at Rice through the Humanities Research Center.

“It’s been quite a year for me,” Patten said. “I am so grateful for these opportunities and the wonderful things that have been happening.”

Patten’s warmth, coupled with his vast knowledge of Dickens, makes him the ideal fit for the roles he’s assuming, said Helena Michie, the Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor in Humanities and chair of the English department.

“Bob can talk to anyone and make them feel comfortable,” she said. “He’s beloved. He makes people feel like they have something worthwhile to say. He’s a bridge between lay people and professional readers of Dickens. He’s a bridge between British and U.S. academic circles.”

As fellow of the Dickens House, Patten will act as a liaison between the house and the various groups hosting Dickens celebration events, and he’ll offer weekend seminars and talks.

“Bob really is the obvious choice for this position that involves meeting and greeting people from around the world and making people feel at home with Dickens,” Michie said. “He’s always been able to do that at Rice. His enthusiasm for Dickens is contagious.”

Patten hopes his time at the house will deepen his understanding of Dickens’ continual impact.

“I also want to research what people, ordinary folks, are getting out of the museum,” Patten said. “I’m interested to know what they are learning and why they came. What is it that draws people to Charles Dickens?”

It was much more than a love of reading that drew Patten to the writer. He felt an affinity to Dickens and the characters within the stories. He had a “Dickensian upbringing,” living with his mother, a single parent in Hollywood. He had an allowance of $1 a week. He’d use part of his earnings for a movie at the nearby Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and then head over to the Pickwick Bookstore.

“I’d buy long books because I wanted them to last all week,” Patten recalled. “And Dickens was a wordy wordsmith.”

In “David Copperfield” and “Great Expectations,” Patten found a home.

“I formed a certain affiliation with those books because they showed that families, in the end, can be built,” he said. “They’re not always biologically determined. Dickens was part of my identification in the world where things would turn out okay. You didn’t have to be rich.”

Patten’s graduate school studies challenged his love for Dickens. Professors and other students criticized Dickens’ longwinded writing and claimed he only wrote that way because he was paid per line written.

“But I felt all kinds of artistry in these books,” Patten said. “It wasn’t just ‘Make them cry, make them laugh, make them wait.’ You could see characters reflecting on the variety of possibilities for working out a life.”

He sought to prove that though Dickens did make money as a writer, he didn’t pander to it. Patten earned a Fulbright and wrote a book on the topic.

“It comes from being a lonely boy in tough circumstances,” he said. “Seeing him write about it, thinking he’s an artist and coming to the conclusion that you can be an artist and get paid.”

Patten brought the love of Dickens to Rice in 1969 and was instrumental in Rice’s involvement in the Dickens Project, a consortium of faculty from prestigious universities in the U.S. and abroad who do a variety of things in terms of scholarship, teaching and outreach related to Dickens and to the Victorian period. Rice is an early member of the project.

To get involved locally in Dickens bicentenary celebration, visit http://www.galvestonhistory.org/Dickens_Overview.asp. To learn more about the global celebrations, visit www.dickens2012.org.