Dickens S England

Dickens's England was a time of unprecedented energy and change which laid the foundations of our own modern society. There was a new world coming into being: new towns, new machines, new and revolutionary ideas, new songs and dances, music-halls and popular novels, as well as new wealth for the smug middle classes. For others, however, there was poverty, struggle and hard labour. Dickens's characters with whom we are so familiar - orphan Oliver and cunning Fagin, snobbish Pip, spendthrift Mr Micawber, pompous Podsnap and humourless Gradgrind - grow out of his own observation. Here, Dickens and his great contemporaries - John Ruskin, Henry Mayhew, Charles Darwin, Thomas Hardy - take us into the heart of what Elizabeth Barrett Browning called 'this live, throbbing age, that brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires'. This is the perfect book for anyone wanting to understand more about the world of our great novelist Charles Dickens.

From October 2009, Sky Arts will be screening Charles Dickens' England, presented and narrated by Derek Jacobi - a journey through the places, buildings, towns, cities and villages where Dickens lived or found inspiration. To coincide with the series, this 256 page book featuring 300 photographs and illustrations will be published, bringing together for the very first time all the of the most important places, towns and cities that were the inspiration for some of the most famous settings in literature.

A topographical biography of Charles Dickens's England. Ideal for everyone interested in the places associated with the great Victorian novelist and his works. This book conducts the reader to every English scene and building connected by any significance with Dickens which is still to be seen today. Despite the numerous changes that have taken place since his death in 1870, many places Dickens knew personally and immortalized in his books still stand; and it is within the setting of these that the authors tell the story of his life - a biography in terms of place, showing how Dickens's keen observation and brilliant descriptive ability transmuted his memories of his homes, his schools, his lodgings, and the towns and villages he visited into the background of his novels and stories. Such was the enormous fame Dickens enjoyed in his lifetime, that any house he lived in, visited or wrote about was remembered for his sake. In Kent, his chosen county and cradle of his genius, the pride in him is strongest, the houses and scenes most abounding; but it is possible to follow him to many other parts of the country and to find something of him in unassuming hotels and seaside inns, lonely churches and stately homes, places that knew him and can help to bring him to life for us. Dickens's England is a fascinating topographical study concentrating on what is still to be seen, rather than what has disappeared, and offers both immediate interest and enduring value for fans of the great author.

A miser learns the true meaning of Christmas when three ghostly visitors review his past and foretell his future.

A “delightful reader’s companion” (The New York Times) to the great nineteenth-century British novels of Austen, Dickens, Trollope, the Brontës, and more, this lively guide clarifies the sometimes bizarre maze of rules and customs that governed life in Victorian England. For anyone who has ever wondered whether a duke outranked an earl, when to yell “Tally Ho!” at a fox hunt, or how one landed in “debtor’s prison,” this book serves as an indispensable historical and literary resource. Author Daniel Pool provides countless intriguing details (did you know that the “plums” in Christmas plum pudding were actually raisins?) on the Church of England, sex, Parliament, dinner parties, country house visiting, and a host of other aspects of nineteenth-century English life—both “upstairs” and “downstairs. An illuminating glossary gives at a glance the meaning and significance of terms ranging from “ague” to “wainscoting,” the specifics of the currency system, and a lively host of other details and curiosities of the day.