Abstract
This year, this competition with Dickens as its point of reference, raises the question of who the Dickens ‘Dickens’ is. Do we mean the man, all the still only partially known facts (if indeed anyone, however closely studied, can be known)? Or do we mean the oeuvre, the writer's voice, the world, and you would have to say the city, created by the sum of his books? Or beyond that, the thing that is more than the sum of its parts – a quality we call ‘Dickensian’ that could appear in films, on TV, on Christmas cards, even, not to mention other writers' books. These questions were not academic for the three of us who sat down together (well, not literally, but it was a real conversation) to judge this competition. As in any competition, we looked for poems that were individual, whole, achieved and unignorable, intensely themselves – in other words, which worked. We also had to decide which of them addressed the theme, and what they brought to it. Here the interesting discussions began.
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