The Dickensian

Fascinated by them, unable to ignore them, and imaginatively stimulated by them, Charles Dickens was an acute and unsentimental reporter on the dogs he kept and encountered during a time when they were a burgeoning part of the nineteenth-century urban and domestic scene. As dogs inhabited Dickens’s city, so too did they populate his fiction, journalism, and letters. In the first book-length work of criticism on Dickens’s relationship to canines, Beryl Gray shows that dogs, real and invented, were intrinsic to Dickens’s vision and experience of London and to his representations of its life. Gray draws on an array of reminiscences by Dickens’s friends, family, and fellow writers, and also situates her book within the context of nineteenth-century attitudes towards dogs as revealed in the periodical press, newspapers, and institutional archives. Integral to her study is her analysis of Dickens’s texts in relationship to their illustrations by George Cruikshank and Hablot Knight Browne and to portraiture by late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists like Thomas Gainsborough and Edwin Landseer. The Dog in the Dickensian Imagination will not only enlighten readers and critics of Dickens and those interested in his life but will serve as an important resource for scholars interested in the Victorian city, the treatment of animals in literature and art, and attitudes towards animals in nineteenth-century Britain.

A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is the second historical novel by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. It depicts the plight of the French proletariat under the brutal oppression of t+E3he French aristocracy in the years leading up to the revolution, and the corresponding savage brutality demonstrated by the revolutionaries toward the former aristocrats in the early years of the revolution. It follows the lives of several protagonists through these events, most notably Charles Darnay, a French once-aristocrat who falls victim to the indiscriminate wrath of the revolution despite his virtuous nature, and Sydney Carton, a dissipated English barrister who endeavours to redeem his ill-spent life out of love for Darnay's wife, Lucie Manette.

Many of Dickens' novels were published serially, in monthly parts, & the appearance of these installments was eagerly awaited. Today the advertisements, published along with the monthly parts, are no less interesting than the novels themselves for being a mirror of the tastes of the Victorian England which subscribed to Mr. Dickens's monthly installments.

GRAB A BUMPER, FORGET YOUR FANTEEGS, AND ROAM AT A FOOT-PACE THROUGH THE TWISTY ALLEYWAYS OF THE VICTORIAN VERNACULAR! What larks! Dive into the world of literature's ultimate wordsmith, Charles Dickens, in this literary romp through his finest quips, barbs, and turns of phrase. Featuring 200 of Dickens' best-loved words, drawn from his fifteen novels and hundreds of short stories, What the Dickens?! is full of period-appropriate definitions, pithy commentary, and charming illustrations. Perfect for word nerds and book lovers of all ages, this volume will have you dragging your friends to the hippo-comedietta and bonneting your anti-Pickwickian adversaries like a proper Victorian in no time!

The figure of the child and the imaginative and emotional capacities associated with children have always been sites of lively contestation for readers and critics of Dickens. In Dickens and the Imagined Child, leading scholars explore the function of the child and childhood within Dickens’s imagination and reflect on the cultural resonance of his engagement with this topic. Part I of the collection examines the Dickensian child as both characteristic type and particular example, proposing a typology of the Dickensian child that is followed by discussions of specific children in Oliver Twist, Dombey and Son, and Bleak House. Part II focuses on the relationship between childhood and memory, by examining the various ways in which the child’s-eye view was reabsorbed into Dickens’s mature sensibility. The essays in Part III focus upon reading and writing as particularly significant aspects of childhood experience; from Dickens’s childhood reading of tales of adventure, they move to discussion of the child readers in his novels and finally to a consideration of his own early writings alongside those that his children contributed to the Gad’s Hill Gazette. The collection therefore builds a picture of the remembered experiences of childhood being realised anew, both by Dickens and through his inspiring example, in the imaginative creations that they came to inform. While the protagonist of David Copperfield-that 'favourite child' among Dickens’s novels-comes to think of his childhood self as something which he 'left behind upon the road of life', for Dickens himself, leafing continually through his own back pages, there can be no putting away of childish things.

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