Professor Baird is giving a public reading of Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers on Feb. 7 at the Jackman Humanities Institute on U of T’s St. George campus.  Details can be found here. 

Why is the work of Charles Dickens still so important 200 years after his birth?

We’re still reading Charles Dickens. He continues to be taught in courses on Victorian literature, but he also continues to be read by people who are just looking for an interesting read. This is really a continuation of the success he enjoyed in his own time.  He was a hugely popular author, read by everybody from Queen Victoria down throughout English society. He found this audience early in his career with his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, when he was 25 years old, and he never lost that grip on his public.

His popularity has survived a variety of shifts in critical opinion. Fifty years after his death in 1870, he was looked down upon by sophisticates like Oscar Wilde who felt Dickens was a rather artless writer whose work was full of sentimental passages one could only laugh at, someone too simple-minded to be a great artist. But people continued to read his work.

Do you think he was a great artist?

Undoubtedly. He wrote 12 major novels, and each one is an imaginative world of its own. He was a writer who ceaselessly reinvented himself as times changed. He was also an important person in the history of fiction. He wasn’t the first person to write novels with complicated plots, but Dickens, in Bleak House in particular, was really a pioneer of the detective novel. It was his assistant editor in the weekly magazine he put out, Household Words, a man named Wilkie Collins, who went on to write a number of novels which are now regarded as the prototypical detective novels. Collins and others were following in a direction where Dickens had set the standard.

The other striking thing about Dickens is his use of language. His writing comes alive. These aren’t just words strung together into sentences. When you read the sentences they have a dynamic kind of relationship with each other, which makes reading Dickens a lively experience. Dickens’s language has a poetic quality, which is in keeping with the kinds of stories that he tells.

Dickens seems to be a novelist who succeeds as both a literary artist and a popular writer.   

Dickens was exceptional in the social range of his readership. His contemporary William Makepeace Thackeray wrote much more for a well-heeled, educated audience. Dickens wrote for everybody, and in that respect he’s like Shakespeare in his plays for the Globe Theatre, where the audience ranges from the nobility in the boxes to the groundlings standing in front of the stage — and Shakespeare is speaking to all of them.  Dickens was that kind of writer and exceptional in that respect.

He was also quite a celebrity, wasn’t he? He did lecture tours that were quite popular. I believe he lectured in Toronto at one point, didn’t he?

Yes, he visited Toronto first at the end of his first North American tour in 1842 and was very pleased to get out of the United States and find himself in Queen Victoria’s empire once again. The public readings were enormously successful but also quite demanding on him and in the end his doctors urged him to stop. He finally did not long before his death. His audiences kept demanding — and he was drawn to it — his version of the end of Oliver Twist where Bill Sykes kills his girlfriend Nancy. It’s a very melodramatic episode and Dickens was physically exhausted by it.

The other aspect of Dickens’s work is that it has an almost journalist aspect to it. In Oliver Twist, for example, he exposed the poverty in London at the time to readers.

That was a very important part of his writing. He began life as a journalist. He became a highly esteemed shorthand reporter around 1830 before he started writing himself. He became a parliamentary reporter. This was just before the reform bill of 1832 and there was a tremendous amount of speechmaking in parliament and elsewhere, and Dickens was very much in demand as a reporter because he was so good at it.

His work as a parliamentary shorthand reporter gave him a lifelong distaste for parliament, which he once called the “national ash heap”. It started him on a career in journalism that in a sense never ended. He became a successful writer of fiction with The Pickwick Papers when he was about 25, but he also edited a daily newspaper for a time. Later for many years he published his own magazines, in which novels were serialized, his own and those of other authors. And his novels are full of reflections of the issues of his day.

He was quite pointed in his social commentary, wasn’t he?

Yes, he touched on many subjects, but three run through all of his novels.

The first was public health, which was very important from the 1830s to the 1860s. Issues like drainage, sewage, provision of clean water, the problems of congested urban areas and the way that disease proliferated in such districts. He not only wrote about public health in his novels, he also campaigned for it — he became president of a society devoted to improving public health.

Another theme is crime, also an issue of continuing concern in the England of his day. How do you catch criminals? And once you’ve caught them,  then what do you do?  He was involved in debates about the function of  prisons — are they places where you take people who have done wrong out of circulation for a while, or are they places where people can be reformed and rehabilitated?

And the most important was education, a crucial issue throughout Dickens’s lifetime.  Education was a battleground between various religious organizations, which argued that education had always historically been a function of the church and ought to remain so, and others contending that in the modern world, education was the responsibility of the state to see that everybody had basic literacy.

These debates were raging throughout Dickens’s life and he goes back again and again in his novels to question how you get education to people, especially to the poor. How do you rescue children from a life of crime or from child labour, how do you get them educated, what are the schools to be like?

Nicholas Nickleby starts out with scenes in Yorkshire schools, which were notorious in the 1830s as places where parents could send children who they had no interest in. Dickens went to Yorkshire and looked into these schools and had his hero, Nicholas Nickleby, look for work as a schoolmaster in a Yorkshire school. This is a good example of the way Dickens used his fiction to expose a social problem. It’s also a good example of his campaigning against the mistreatment of children.

Is there one novel that can be called his best?

That’s a hard question. I usually think that Dickens’s best novel is the one I happen to be reading at the time.

Perhaps the easiest novel to read for somebody who’s never read Dickens is David Copperfield, which is partly autobiographical, the story of a boy who has a difficult childhood, rather like Dickens’s, and who goes on to become a successful parliamentary reporter and novelist.

But the novel he wrote after that, Bleak House, to me is the novel that conveys more of Dickens’s qualities. Its two stories — one is a retrospective account and one in the present tense. The two stories alternate throughout the novel. They seem to be disconnected, but eventually converge in the same spot and the same moment in time. This shows Dickens’s powers of construction in fiction extremely well, and it’s an exciting read.

You’re reading from The Pickwick Papers.  Why?

My bicentennial project is to read all the novels in chronological order and I like to re-read The Pickwick Papers, which is the first one, at Christmas every year. Also, the trial scene that I’m reading was one of Dickens’s favourite readings.

Pickwick was hugely important for him because he came to write it almost by accident. He was asked to take on this job of writing monthly installments to provide an opportunity for a popular artist to draw pictures and the idea was that readers would pay a shilling a month to get four pictures and 24 pages of prose narrative.  He took this on because they were offering him 14 pounds a month and that would enable him to get married.

After two months the original artist died and Dickens got more control over the project. The monthly installment went up to 32 pages of narrative and he found an illustrator who would follow his wishes. Gradually he developed the monthly episodes into something quite different. Within a year the print run went from 400 copies a month to 40,000 a month. This was a runaway bestseller and it set Dickens up as the most popular writer of his time, and he never lost that position in later years.

NSERC’s Strategic Project Grants (SPG) Program aims to increase research and training that will enhance Canada’s economy, society, and/or the environment over the next 10 years in the following target areas:

• Information and Communications Technologies
• Environmental Science and Technologies
• Manufacturing
• Natural Resources and Energy

Key Requirements:

• Have well-defined objectives, scope and duration   (1-3 years)
• Have one or more supporting organizations that are actively involved in all stages of the project and can apply the results

Funding:

• No Limit (Note: Average yearly request is ~$45,000)

The 2012 competition is now open.

Learn more about this program at an Information Session featuring an NSERC Representative who will discuss the program and changes for 2012, and a successful applicant at UofT.  The Session details are as follows:

Thursday, February 9, 2012, 2-4 pm
Michael E. Charles Council Chambers,
GB202, Galbraith Building, 35 St. George Street.

Please RSVP by February 7th, by sending an email to:  Martina Simmonds

More Information:  details about this year’s competition, including new features of the SPG program, and deadlines for those wishing to apply are available on our website at:  NSERC Strategic Project Grant Program 2012.

• read more

“Understanding and accurately predicting the response of physicians to incentives is essential if governments wish to increase the supply of physician services,” says Prof. Brian Golden, who holds the Sandra Rotman Chair in Health Sector Strategy at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, who wrote the article with Rotman Prof. Doug Hyatt and Rosemary Hannam of the Rotman School’s Centre for Health Sector Strategy.

Access to health care in Canada is a challenge in many regions, and while there has been an oversupply of physicians in the past, many people currently have problems getting care. “Central to the issue of access is the adequacy of the supply of physicians — specifically, whether the number of physicians and their work effort sufficiently addresses the health care needs of the population,” write the authors. “Supply is appropriately managed when there is neither a shortage nor surplus of services.”

Provincial and territorial governments can help increase access to care by setting policies that influence physicians to increase their working hours and thereby affect the supply of services they provide. Ironically, by having such a strong impact on hours worked, the authors report that increased pay to attract more physicians can also have the unintended consequence of reducing the hours physicians choose to work.

Governments may provide nonwage compensation such as recruitment or retention bonuses, repayment of tuition fees, relocation support or staffing costs. However, nonwage rewards not linked to hours worked “also reduce the fixed costs of a practice and create a pure income effect, thereby inducing fewer hours of work and fewer services provided.”

“Linking compensation to time worked or services provided, as opposed to forms of pay that are unrelated to time worked, will better ensure the goal of increased work hours,” the authors conclude. “Policy-makers should recognize that policies for compensation may result in just what we hope for — or just the opposite.”

CMAJ showcases innovative research and ideas aimed at improving health for people in Canada and globally. It publishes original clinical research, analyses and reviews, news, practice updates and thought-provoking editorials. In 2011, the journal celebrates 100 years of publishing medical knowledge in print and now online at cmaj.ca.

For the latest thinking on business, management and economics from the Rotman School of Management, visit http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/NewThinking .

A new article by researchers at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University presents a new model that explains how the diverse domains of power, intoxication, and anonymity produce similarly paradoxical social behaviors – for better or worse.

According to the researchers, all three states work to break down inhibitions in a person, thus triggering the most prominent response in any given situation regardless of the consequences. As a result, alcohol, power, and anonymity can all inspire heroism and hedonism in the same person depending on the context.

The paper, by Rotman Profs. Jacob Hirsh and Chen-Bo Zhong and the Kellogg School’s Adam Galinsky appears in the current issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science.

“Disinhibition occurs when the forces that normally constrain behaviour are temporarily removed, allowing a person’s initial impulses to be expressed without hesitation, regardless of the consequence,” says Prof. Hirsh.

The authors argue that disinhibition can lead behavior to be more consistent with one’s true underlying motives or dispositions. However, if strong external cues are present, disinhibition can also result in greater situational influences on behavior. Whether the resulting behavioral outcomes are pro-social or anti-social depends upon the nature of the dispositional or situational cue.

“This is why intoxicated individuals can be aggressive in one instant and altruistic in another, for example, or why anonymity can at once increase selfishness and cheating while also promoting helping behavior,” said Prof. Hirsh.

The new paper presents a general model of and three pathways to disinhibition:

•    Social Power: Powerful people are used to relative abundance and have an increased inclination to pursue potential rewards. Because the experience of power increases a “goal and reward focus,” individuals feel less restrained in expressing their current motives – regardless of the social implications.

•    Intoxication: Consuming too much alcohol decreases cognitive resources, and only the most prominent cues will guide behavior in this state. Thus, pre-existing attitudes and personality traits may be expressed more freely, such as aggressive tendencies or risky sexual decision-making. At the same time, however, inebriated individuals tend to be more helpful than sober counterparts when the situation calls for heroism.

•    Anonymity: A cloaked identity serves to reduce social desirability concerns and external constraints on action. As such, an individual may be less inclined to maintain usual levels of social acceptance. This could result in higher levels of honesty and self-disclosure – or heightened aggression and verbal abuse – in an anonymous chatroom.

Each of these processes – a reward focus, cognitive exhaustion, and lack of social concerns –block the same neurological system – the Behavioral Inhibition System – that regulates behavior. The combination of these forces (e.g., a powerful person who has been imbibing all night and then goes into an anonymous chat room) is likely to produce the most disinhibition.

“Although these pathways appear to be unrelated on the surface, they all lead to disinhibited states through a common psychological mechanism,” said Prof. Hirsh.

In conclusion, Prof. Hirsh said a joint understanding of an individual’s motivations and the situational context in which they find themselves allows for a better understanding of how to manage the impact of disinhibition.

“Disinhibition can bring out the best or worst in people, depending on the most salient cues for action. Bars and boardrooms alike should be designed to encourage the desired responses from their disinhibited occupants,” said Prof. Hirsh.

For the latest thinking on business, management and economics from the Rotman School of Management, visit http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/NewThinking .

Khan, a master’s degree student in applied computing, used the course Topics in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to explore the ways Kinect might be used in elementary school classrooms for gesture and speech recognition.

The course focused on user experiences with next-generation input and output technologies. Students read and discussed papers from leading researchers around the world, and had the opportunity to apply their teachings to building their own interactive system using exciting new technologies. Khan decided to use the Microsoft Kinect as new hardware.

Khan enjoyed developing some ways that the Kinect might be used for pedagogical purposes. She explained: “While we discussed various HCI papers in class, I constantly found myself applying the research ideas and techniques specifically to the user group of children… I thought that applications of these techniques could help tremendously in early childhood education.”

Inspired by course readings, Khan developed prototypes in which the user participates in activities by using voice commands and gestures – “pointing to objects on screen and using voice commands to select them.” In her research examples, the voice command could be a simple “this” or “that”, or be a more specific naming activity (e.g., “horse”), based on the activity. (Watch a related video.)

Khan said, “The power of using gesture and speech-based systems in classrooms could not only make an interactive and fun experience, but could also simplify a lot of complex learning.”

Khan tested out her prototypes on her daughters, ages four and seven, and found the use of the Kinect made the activities, such as counting, classification, patterning, and identification, very effective and entertaining for her “usability testers.” She was also able to test her work in her daughter’s Junior Kindergarten classroom.

“As a mother involved in [my daughters’] early years learning development,” Khan noted, “I definitely see the potential use of this technology in education.”

When asked about future plans for research in this area, the graduate student said, “I plan to continue developing more simple prototypes, demonstrating my ideas that can be adapted to classroom education. I also hope to explore this space in the development of assistive and rehabilitative technologies.”

Work with next-generation technologies offers a whole host of life-changing possibilities.

• read more

Officially named Siphusauctum gregarium, fossils reveal a tulip-shaped creature that is about the length of a dinner knife (approximately 20 centimetres) and has a unique filter feeding system.

Siphusauctum has a long stem, with a calyx – a bulbous cup-like structure – near the top that encloses an unusual filter feeding system and a gut. The animal is thought to have fed by filtering particles from water actively pumped into its calyx through small holes. The stem ends with a small disc which anchored the animal to the seafloor. Siphusauctum lived in large clusters, as indicated by slabs containing over 65 individual specimens.

Lorna O’Brien, a PhD candidate in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto and her supervisor, associate professor Jean-Bernard Caron, curator of invertebrate palaeontology at the Royal Ontario Museum, reported on the discovery Jan. 18 in the online science journal PLoS ONE.

“Most interesting is that this feeding system appears to be unique among animals. Recent advances have linked many bizarre Burgess Shale animals as primitive members of many animal groups that are found today, but Siphusauctum defies this trend.  We do not know where it fits in relation to other organisms,” said lead author O’Brien.

“Our description is based on more than 1,100 fossil specimens from a new Burgess Shale locality that has been nicknamed the Tulip Beds,” she added.

Located in Yoho National Park, British Columbia, the Tulip Beds were first discovered in 1983 by the Royal Ontario Museum. They are located high on Mount Stephen, overlooking the town of Field. Like the rest of the Burgess Shale, the beds represent rock layers with exceptional preservation of mostly soft-bodied organisms.

The Burgess Shale, protected under the larger Rocky Mountain Parks UNESCO World Heritage site and managed by Parks Canada, preserves fossil evidence of some of the earliest complex animals that lived in the oceans of our planet nearly 505 million years ago. The discovery of Siphusauctum expands the range of animal diversity that existed during this time period.

The research was partially funded by UofT fellowships to O’Brien and a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Discovery Grant awarded to Caron.

To learn more about the Burgess Shale visit burgess-shale.rom.on.ca

The social and ecological implications of this massive and rapid urbanization are explored in The Natural City: Re-envisioning the Built Environment.

Co-edited by philosopher Ingrid Leman Stefanovic and religious studies scholar Stephen Bede Scharper, the book brings experts from a range of disciplines — anthropology, architecture, engineering, geography, philosophy, planning, religion and urban studies among them — together to explore how to integrate the “natural” and “urban” environment.

At its thematic core is a new understanding of the “natural city” that moves beyond a prevalent dichotomy that sees nature and city as separate and even opposing entities. Stefanovic notes that this false dichotomy continues to drive decision-making in subtle ways, is deeply rooted in our everyday institutions and even in our language. The United Nations Environment Programme, for example, still functions as a distinct entity from the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements, and urban planning and environmental programs are typically housed in different departments in colleges and universities. But, as Stefanovic points out, cities are as much a part of nature as forests. “As human beings, we dwell: it is natural therefore that we build,” she writes.

She explains that the term “natural city” is not meant to simply replace other concepts that emphasize the need to build in a more “green,” ‘healthy” or “sustainable” way. Rather it is to remind us that the view of city and nature as separate entities nature is widely and deeply held, almost taken-for-granted and so is bypassed in discussions of urban planning and design. This artificial schism between “natural” and “urban” environment then ultimately drives policy and decision making within human settlements creating fundamental barriers to genuine sustainability.

“The Natural City presents a compelling vision of what urban life could be if we accept those links between ecological and human systems and build our cities in ways that work in harmony with the planet,” says David Miller, counsel, International Business and Sustainability, Airs & Berlis, and former mayor of the City of Toronto.

“We now begin to see that our habits, polluting as they are, cannot be viewed independently of the health and well-being of the planet as a whole.  Nature is more than simply an escape from the concrete jungle; on the contrary, it sustains and permeates our existence — whether that is rural, urban, or situated in a northern wilderness that is now home to PCB residuals and glacial warming,” says Stefanovic.

In addition to Stefanovic and Scharper, the book includes essays by U of T scholars Frank Cunningham, Hilary Cunningham, Bryan Karney and Vincent Shen. The Natural City: Re-Envisioning the Built Environment book launch is Thursday, January 26, 4:30 – 7:30 p.m. at Toronto City Hall.

• read more