The World Of Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens is one of the most popular and enduring authors in the English language. His novels, short stories and sketches have made an indelible impression on generations of readers. This book presents the author's life and works in a highly illustrated volume that takes a thematic all-encompassing look at this brilliant writer and the society that so influenced his work. It also looks at both the public and the private Dickens- his beliefs, his passions and his relationships. -- from Book Jacket.

George Orwell once said of Dickensâe(tm) work: âeoeIt is not so much a series of books, it is more like a world.âe In this book, J. Hillis Miller attempts to identify this âeoeworld,âe to show how a single view of life pervades every novel that Dickens wrote, and to trace the development of this view throughout the chronological span of Dickensâe(tm) career. There are full critical analyses of six of the novelsâe"Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Martin Chuzzlewit, Bleak House, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friendâe"and shorter discussions of many of the others. Each novel has been viewed as the transformation of the real world of Dickensâe(tm) experience into an imaginary world with certain special qualities of its own. Certain elements persist through all the novels, the most important of which are the general situation of the hero at the beginning of the story and the general nature of the world in which he lives. Each of Dickensâe(tm) heroes begins his life cut off from other people, in a world which seems menacing and unfriendly and, on the social side, composed of inexplicable rituals and mysterious conventions; each lives, like Paul Dombey, âeoewith an aching void in his young heart, and all outside so cold, and bare, and strange.âe The heroes then move through successive adventures in an attempt to understand the world, to integrate themselves into it, and thus to find their true identity. Initially creatures of poverty and indigence, those characters reach out for something which transcends the material world and the self, something other than human, which will support and maintain the self without engulfing it. Within the totality of Dickens' novels this problemâe"the search for selfhoodâe"is stated and restated, until, in the later novels, the answer is found to line in a rejections of the past, the given, and the exterior, and a reorientation toward the future and the free human spirit itself as the only true sources of value. With a real understating and sympathy for his subject, Miller manages to transport us into the midst of Dickensâe(tm) âeoeworldâe and to bring alive for us the whole strange and wonderful tribe that people his novels. This is an enlightening, well-written, enjoyable book for anyone who has ever had an interest in Dickens and his work.

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.

A beautifully illustrated anthology of some of Charles Dickens' greatest works retold and adapted by the incredibly talented Angela McAllister.