The question, prompted by two Charles Dickens novels, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, being named to Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club, prompted The Wall Street Journal to put the issue to two Dickens scholars: Bates Professor of English Lillian Nayder and Michael Slater, a Dickens biographer and professor emeritus of Victorian literature at Birkbeck College in London.

Said Nayder, “There’s no doubt that A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations will speak to our own concerns with social inequity, mismanagement and greed.” And, she added, “any recent college graduate still living at home and looking for work is also likely to relate to Pip, with his thwarted ambitions and his modest career.”

Nayder is author of The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth (Cornell University Press, 2010), the first comprehensive portrait of the woman whom Charles Dickens married and then repudiated as unfit after 22 years of marriage and 10 children. Nayder’s book demonstrates that Catherine Dickens was a competent woman and her marriage a happy one for much of its duration.

Related stories about The Other Dickens:

• From The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 12, 2010
• Review of The Other Dickens by the WSJ
• Q&A with Portland Press Herald writer Ray Routhier
• Story by the Sun Journal‘s David Sargent ’62

Sharan, of Jamshedpur, India, majors in economics and has a minor in Russian.

In her first blog entry, on Sept. 22,  she mentions that a summer  internship in the office of a Bates alum in Washington, D.C., took place in “a unique corporate setting that steered my career goals in a new direction.”

Read Sharan’s first blog entry and short biographies of her and her eight fellow bloggers.

In the Sept. 26 story “Want to Go to Harvard Law?” correspondent Elizabeth Bernstein noted that graduate school officials told the Wall Street Journal that, along with the Ivy League schools, the “small liberal arts colleges tend to do a better job of advising their students in areas like picking courses that look good on an application. And when students work directly with professors in small classes, they tend to get better recommendation letters.”

Bates placed 40th in the list of so-called feeder schools, between CBB peers Bowdoin (19) and Colby (46). Topping the list were Harvard, Yale and Princeton.
In its ranking, the Journal considered graduate schools in medicine, business and law. The selected medical schools were Columbia, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, UC-San Francisco and Yale. The business schools were Chicago, Dartmouth’s Tuck School, Harvard, MIT’s Sloan School and Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. The law schools were Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, Michigan and Yale.
The Wall Street Journal said its ranking compared the total number of a college’s 2003 graduates with the number attending the 15 graduate programs this fall. Of the 417 Bates graduates in May 2003, eight are attending the selected graduate schools.