Charles Dickens, a man so representative of his age as to have become considered synonymous with it, demands to be read in context. This book illuminates the worlds - social, political, economic and artistic - in which Dickens worked. Dickens's professional life encompassed work as a novelist, journalist, editor, public reader and passionate advocate of social reform. This volume offers a detailed treatment of Dickens in each of these roles, exploring the central features of Dickens's age, work and legacy, and uncovering sometimes surprising faces of the man and of the range of Dickens industries. Through 45 digestible short chapters written by a leading expert on each topic, a rounded picture emerges of Dickens's engagement with his time, the influence of his works and the ways he has been read, adapted and re-imagined from the nineteenth century to the present.

Charles Dickens, a man so representative of his age as to have become considered synonymous with it, demands to be read in context. This book illuminates the worlds - social, political, economic and artistic - in which Dickens worked. Dickens's professional life encompassed work as a novelist, journalist, editor, public reader and passionate advocate of social reform. This volume offers a detailed treatment of Dickens in each of these roles, exploring the central features of Dickens's age, work and legacy, and uncovering sometimes surprising faces of the man and of the range of Dickens industries. Through 45 digestible short chapters written by a leading expert on each topic, a rounded picture emerges of Dickens's engagement with his time, the influence of his works and the ways he has been read, adapted and re-imagined from the nineteenth century to the present.

Charles Dickens's 200th birthday will be celebrated in 2012. Though his writings are now more than 100 years old, many remain in print and are avidly read and studied. Often overlooked--or unknown--are the considerable Christian convictions Dickens held and displayed in his work. This book fills that vacuum by examining Dickens the Christian and showing how Christian beliefs and practices permeate his work. This historical work is written for pastors, students, and laity alike. Chapters look at Dickens's life and work topically, arguing that Christian faith was front and center in some of what Dickens wrote (such as his children's work The Life of Our Lord) and saliently implicit throughout various other characters and plots. Since Dickens's Christian side is rarely considered, Gary Colledge illuminates a fresh angle of Dickens, and the 200th birthday makes it especially timely.

No library's complete without the classics! This new edition collects the greatest works of Charles Dickens, one of the most popular novelists of all time. Oliver Twist. Pip. The ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future. The characters of Charles Dickens live on in our imaginations long after we've read his renowned works of social commentary and vivid storytelling. And though these novels were written more than one hundred years ago, no home library today would be complete without them. This Canterbury Classics edition of Charles Dickens collects some of his most famous and beloved works--The Adventures of Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations--into a single volume. For those who've never read Dickens, it's the perfect opportunity to experience his unique and compelling writing. And for those who are already Dickens devotees, an introduction by a renowned scholar will provide additional context and food for thought.

The motivations behind Dickens' novels and the poverty-stricken world of 19th century London.

Dickens A to Z is a guide to Dickens's life, works, characters, the Victorian context in which he lived and wrote, and the critics and scholars who have commented on his novels. This unique encyclopedia is a superbly organized, integrated reference suitable for both Dickens scholars and Dickens fans. Among the more than 2,500 cross-referenced entries can be found articles about: every Dickens novel, including story synopses, commentary, criticism, and adaptations; each of Dickens's journalistic essays, sketches, poems, and plays; each character Dickens created; Dickens's family, friends, acquaintances, professional contemporaries, and critics; places important to Dickens's life and work; social issues in Victorian England; and much more. This encyclopedia is enhanced by 50 illustrations, many of them by Dickens's contemporaries, a chronology, a selected bibliography, and an index.

Using hundreds of primary sources, Charles Dickens in Love narrates the story of the most intense romances of Charles Dickens' life and shows how his novels both testify to his own strongest affections and serve as memorials to the young women he loved all too well, if not always wisely. When Charles Dickens died in 1870, he was the best-known man in the English-speaking world - the preeminent Victorian celebrity, universally mourned as both a noble spirit and the greatest of novelists. Yet, the first person named in his will was an unknown woman named Ellen Ternan - only a handful of people had any idea who she was. Of his romance with Ellen, Dickens had written, "it belongs to my life and probably will only die out of the same with the proprietor," and so it was. She remained the most important person in his life until his death. She was not the first woman who had fired his imagination. As a young man he had fallen deeply in love with a woman who "pervaded every chink and crevice" of his mind for three years, Maria Beadnell. When she eventually jilted him he vowed that "I never can love any human creature but yourself." A few years later he was stunned by the sudden death of his young sister-in-law, Mary Scott Hogarth, and worshiped her memory for the rest of his life. "I solemnly believe that so perfect a creature never breathed," he declared, and he died over thirty years later still wearing her ring. Charles Dickens has no rival as the most fertile creative imagination since William Shakespeare, and no one influenced his imagination more powerfully than these three women, his muses and teachers in the school of love.

Winner of the Plutarch Award for Best Biography A lively and insightful biographical celebration of the imaginative genius of Charles Dickens, published in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of his death. Charles Dickens was a superb public performer, a great orator and one of the most famous of the Eminent Victorians. Slight of build, with a frenzied, hyper-energetic personality, Dickens looked much older than his fifty-eight years when he died—an occasion marked by a crowded funeral at Westminster Abbey, despite his waking wishes for a small affair. Experiencing the worst and best of life during the Victorian Age, Dickens was not merely the conduit through whom some of the most beloved characters in literature came into the world. He was one of them. Filled with the twists, pathos, and unusual characters that sprang from this novelist’s extraordinary imagination, The Mystery of Charles Dickens looks back from the legendary writer’s death to recall the key events in his life. In doing so, he seeks to understand Dickens’ creative genius and enduring popularity. Following his life from cradle to grave, it becomes clear that Dickens’s fiction drew from his life—a fact he acknowledged. Like Oliver Twist, Dickens suffered a wretched childhood, then grew up to become not only a respectable gentleman but an artist of prodigious popularity. Dickens knew firsthand the poverty and pain his characters endured, including the scandal of a failed marriage. Going beyond standard narrative biography, A. N. Wilson brilliantly revisits the wellspring of Dickens’s vast and wild imagination, to reveal at long last why his novels captured the hearts of nineteenth century readers—and why they continue to resonate today. The Mystery of Charles Dickens is illustrated with 30 black-and-white images.

Charles Dickens is credited with creating some of the world's best-known fictional characters, and is widely regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian age. Even before reading the works of Dickens many people have met him already in some form or another. His characters have such vitality that they have leapt from his pages to enjoy flourishing lives of their own: The Artful Dodger, Miss Havisham, Scrooge, Fagin, Mr Micawber, and many many more. His portrait has been in our pockets, on our ten-pound notes; he is a national icon, indeed himself a generator of what Englishness signifies. In this book Jenny Hartley explores the key themes running through Dickens's corpus of works, and considers how they reflect his attitudes towards the harsh realities of nineteenth century society and its institutions, such as the workhouses and prisons. Running alonside this is Dickens's relish of the carnivalesque; if there is a prison in almost every novel, there is also a theatre. She considers Dickens's multiple lives and careers: as magazine editor for two thirds of his working life, as travel writer and journalist, and his work on behalf of social causes including ragged schools and fallen women. She also shows how his public readings enthralled the readers he wanted to reach but also helped to kill him. Finally, Hartley considers what we mean when we use the term 'Dickensian' today, and how Dickens's enduring legacy marks him out as as a novelist different in kind from others.

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