Forty years is a lengthy stretch in the life of an organization. Almost equal to two generations, four decades offer latitude for second thoughts, change and new directions. Individuals involved in the founding of an association may have died, defining occasions faded into memory, key decisions forgotten or subsequently revised, and details about the early years lost from sight, visible only through records on which dust has fallen. The evolution of the Dickens Society offers no exception to such developments. Early issues of Dickens Studies Newsletter, the Society's periodical, however, document the organization's history and provide a reliable source from which to trace the circumstances of its origins, those responsible for its foundation and the objectives that brought together students of Dickens on both sides of the Atlantic at a moment in history shaped by circumstances unlike those that prevail today. The novelist himself of course generated the momentum, a writer whose command of language and creative imagination provided enough material to engage generations of readers, critics and scholars in numbers sufficient to justify use of the epithet, "The Dickens industry." Significant re-assessments of Dickens began in the 1930s;1 but another thirty years passed before consensus emerged about the need to study his reputation in detail and catalogue the outpouring of materials his fiction, journalism and life inspired. One harbinger of the harvest of publications reaped in 1970 by the centenary of his birth was the Symposium moderated by Noel C. Peyrouton at Northeastern University, Boston, on 10 June 1962. Held jointly with the Dickens Fellowship, the occasion also served as the Fellowship's 56th Annual Conference and brought together a panel of four distinguished scholars--George H. Ford, Edgar Johnson, J. Hillis Miller and Sylvere Monod--to chart "Dickens Criticism: Past, Present, and Future Directions." Eight years later, Ford and Monod joined Philip Collins, K. J. Fielding and Michael Slater to survey "Dickens & Fame 1870--1970," contributing five substantial essays on his reputation, each organized by decades. A Prologue by Margaret Lane, "The Last Months," and a Postscript by Dilys Powell, "Dickens on Film," filled out this landmark survey, published by The Dickens Fellowship as the Centenary number of The Dickensian in 1970.
