This book interprets a number of Dickens' works through the detailed analysis of a single characterization in each. It is mainly concerned with the textual functions of characters, i.e., with how analyses of Dickens's methods of characterization help us understand what characters do within his texts. The author presents a selective variety of major and minor characters. Included are examples from the three main periods of Dickens's career, from his non-fiction as well as fiction, and from the combination of both that is Sketches by Boz. There is an emphasis on the later books and particularly on Our Mutual Friend. Contents: IntroductionóSome Sketches by Boz; Modifying SummariesóThe Fat Boy in The Pickwick Papers; Young Bailey in Martin Chuzzlewit; Gaffer Hexam in Our Mutual Friend; NarratorsóSome Epistolary Personae; The Troubled Traveler in Pictures From Italy; The Sentimental Paternalist in A Christmas Carol; Extending the Interface: The Third Narrator in Bleak House; The Middle-aged Businessman: The Narrator of Great Expectations; Sexism and Class Bias: The Narrator of Our Mutual Friend; Two Re-readersóKnowing What Happens in Our Mutual Friend; Droodiana and The Mystery of Edwin Drood; Characterisation and Ideas in Little Dorrit: Clennam and Calvinism; Characterisation and Structure: John Harmon in Our Mutual Friend; Story and Text.

THE ACCLAIMED DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY OF ONE OF THE GREATEST BRITISH WRITERS OF ALL TIME Charles Dickens was a phenomenon: a journalist, a father of ten, a supporter of liberal social causes, but most of all, a great novelist. From unpromising beginnings sent to work a black factory age twelve, he rose to such social and literary heights that when he died, the world mourned. Yet the brilliance concealed a divided character: a republican, he disliked America; sentimental about the family, he took up with a young actress; usually generous, he cut off his impecunious children. From the award-winning author Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens: A Life paints an unforgettable portrait of Dickens, capturing brilliantly the complex character of this great genius. If you loved Great Expectations, Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol, this book is invaluable reading. 'By far the most humane and imaginatively sympathetic account yet for the general reader' Amanda Craig, New Statesman

The Chimes A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In, a short novel by Charles Dickens, was written and published in 1844, one year after A Christmas Carol. It is the second in his series of Christmas books five short books with strong social and moral messages that he published during the 1840's.

In much of his earlier work Roger D. Sell was shaping literary studies, historical perspectives, and pragmatics into a fluent interdisciplinarity. This enabled him to explore the fundamentally human relationships which develop between literary writers and those who respond to them. Literary writers, through their handling of deixis, evaluative and modal expressions, tellability, politeness norms, and genre expectations, activate the same interpersonal function of language as do other language users, and respondents’ hermeneutic contextualizations of literary texts are no less standard as a pragmatic procedure. Not that context is completely determinative. In Sell’s account, human beings are profoundly influenced by society, but can sometimes enter into co-adaptations with it. Like other people, literary writers and their respondents are “social individuals”, who themselves benefit from respecting each other’s relative autonomy. As well as explaining these theoretical positions, the papers selected here offered critical re-assessments of some major writers, including Chaucer and Dickens. They also suggested new ways of dealing with literary texts in literary and language education at all levels.

As readers, we develop an impression of characters and their settings in a novel based on the author’s description of their physical characteristics and surroundings. This process, known as physiognomy, can be seen throughout history including in the English Realist novels of the 19th and 20th centuries. Vision and Character: Physiognomics and the English Realist Novel offers a study into the physiognomics and aesthetics as presented by some of the best known authors in this genre, like Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. In this highly original approach to the issues of representation, visuality and aesthetics in the nineteenth-century realist novel, and even the question of literary interpretation, Eike Kronshage argues that physiognomics has enabled writers to access their characters’ inner lives without interfering in an authoritative way.

Paul Dombey is a cold, unbending, pompous merchant, and a widower with two children - Paul and Florence. His chief ambition is to perpetuate the firm-name. He dreams of passing his business on to his son. Dombey dotes on his son, and neglects and mistreats his daughter.The "son" in the title of the book is incapable of ever joining the firm. A sickly and odd child, Paul dies at the age of six. Dombey pours his resentment and anger out on his daughter, whom he pushes away despite her efforts to earn her father's love.Eventually Dombey remarries, after literally acquiring his new wife from her father in a commercial transaction. Dombey is as bad a husband as he is a father and his marriage is loveless. His new bride hates Dombey and eventually runs off with Canker, his business manager. Dombey characteristically blames Florence for this reversal, and strikes her, causing Florence to run away as well.Abandoned by everyone, Dombey loses his business and goes half insane, living in his decaying house. Dombey is eventually reconciled to his daughter, who always a doormat forgives her father........

This book presents a way into the Dickensian world that starts from linguistic patterns, employing corpus linguistic methodology to study electronic versions of his texts. With its corpus stylistics focus, the book presents an innovative approach to the language of one of the most popular English authors, taking a fresh view on aspects such as characterization, speech and body language. Thus, Mahlberg bridges the gap between linguistic and literary studies, providing a useful resource for both researchers and students of language and literature.