The Night Side of Dickens

The Night Side of Dickens
Author: Harry Stone
Publisher:
Total Pages: 770
Release: 1994
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

"The Night Side of Dickens looks beyond the public image of Charles Dickens and his works to examine the startling dark side of the novelist's creative powers, the side where images of cannibalism, unbridled passion, and inexorable fate resided. Harry Stone, one of the preeminent Dickens scholars of our generation, has studied the entire Dickens oeuvre, including the previously unattributed story "The Bride's Chamber," a work that provides important new insights into Dickens' emotional life and creative energies." "By concentrating on the origins and then tracing the astonishing development of three crucial but largely unexamined areas of Dickens' life and art - his obsession with cannibalism, his latter-day experience of and depictions of passion, and his increasing attention to necessity, to behavior that is predetermined and inexorable - Stone offers us an enlarged and deeper appreciation of Dickens' protean art. Employing biographical, psychological, sociological, historical, linguistic, structural, textual, and archetypal techniques, The Night Side of Dickens ranges through the entire Dickens canon, including newly discovered and newly authenticated writings and important unpublished materials. Stone also examines the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary, journalistic, graphic, medical, ethnographic, and other, often exotic, sources that helped shape the way Dickens saw and re-created everyday life. In the course of this wide-ranging odyssey through Dickens' mind and world, Stone presents the reader with a new and unconventional appreciation of nineteenth-century life and culture, a panorama teeming with humor, horror, and boundless diversity, all brought to vibrant immediacy in 145 full-page illustrations." "A major work of literary scholarship, The Night Side of Dickens offers important insights, not only for Dickens readers and scholars, but for anyone interested in the creative process and in the bright highways and dark byways of nineteenth-century literature and life."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

American Notes

American Notes
Author: Charles Dickens
Publisher: Lindhardt og Ringhof
Total Pages: 149
Release: 2021-02-26
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 8726595591

"All that is loathsome, drooping, or decayed is here." In 1842 Dickens sailed to America to observe The New World that held such fascination for the English. He went to magnificent landmarks like Niagara Falls but also included visits to mental institutions and prisons. He met President John Tyler in D.C and the well-educated Laura Bridgman, who was deaf-blind. Dickens found lots to admire, but also noted how coarse and ill-mannered the Americans were. That did not go over well with the Americans. With superb language and humour, Dickens gathered these fascinating observations in this travelogue that will have anyone with the slightest interest in cultural differences completely spell-bound. Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was an English author, social critic, and philanthropist. Much of his writing first appeared in small instalments in magazines and was widely popular. Among his most famous novels are Oliver Twist (1839), David Copperfield (1850), and Great Expectations (1861).

Hard Times

Hard Times
Author: Charles Dickens
Publisher:
Total Pages: 392
Release: 1854
Genre:
ISBN:

What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew

What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew
Author: Daniel Pool
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 422
Release: 2012-10-02
Genre: Education
ISBN: 143914480X

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.

Dombey and Son

Dombey and Son
Author: Charles Dickens
Publisher:
Total Pages: 564
Release: 1848
Genre: English fiction
ISBN:

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........

Knowing Dickens

Knowing Dickens
Author: Rosemarie Bodenheimer
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2012-11-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0801467012

In this compelling and accessible book, Rosemarie Bodenheimer explores the thoughtworld of the Victorian novelist who was most deeply intrigued by nineteenth-century ideas about the unconscious mind. Dickens found many ways to dramatize in his characters both unconscious processes and acts of self-projection—notions that are sometimes applied to him as if he were an unwitting patient. Bodenheimer explains how the novelist used such techniques to negotiate the ground between knowing and telling, revealing and concealing. She asks how well Dickens knew himself—the extent to which he understood his own nature and the ways he projected himself in his fictions—and how well we can know him. Knowing Dickens is the first book to systematically explore Dickens's abundant correspondence in relation to his published writings. Gathering evidence from letters, journalistic essays, stories, and novels that bear on a major issue or pattern of response in Dickens's life and work, Bodenheimer cuts across familiar storylines in Dickens biography and criticism in chapters that take up topics including self-defensive language, models of memory, relations of identification and rivalry among men, houses and household management, and walking and writing.

The Haunting of Charles Dickens

The Haunting of Charles Dickens
Author: Lewis Buzbee
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2010-10-26
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1429961740

Meg Pickel's older brother, Orion, has disappeared. One night, she steals out to look for him, and makes two surprising discoveries: She stumbles upon a séance that she suspects involves Orion, and she meets the author Charles Dickens, also unable to sleep, and roaming the London streets. He is a customer of Meg's father, who owns a print shop, and a family friend. Mr. Dickens fears that the children of London aren't safe, and is trying to solve the mystery of so many disappearances. If he can, then perhaps he'll be able to write once again. With stunning black-and-white illustrations by Greg Ruth, here is a literary mystery that celebrates the power of books, and brings to life one of the world's best-loved authors.

Charles Dickens Books

Charles Dickens Books
Author: Charles Dickens
Publisher:
Total Pages: 104
Release: 2021-04-21
Genre:
ISBN:

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.

The Uncommercial Traveller Illustrated

The Uncommercial Traveller Illustrated
Author: Charles Dickens
Publisher:
Total Pages: 472
Release: 2021-04-02
Genre:
ISBN:

The Uncommercial Traveller is a collection of literary sketches and reminiscences written by Charles Dickens, published in 1860-1861.In 1859 Dickens founded a new journal called All the Year Round and the Uncommercial Traveller articles would be among his main contributions. He seems to have chosen the title and persona of the Uncommercial Traveller as a result of a speech he gave on 22 December 1859 to the Commercial Travellers' School London in his role as honorary chairman and treasurer. The persona sits well with a writer who liked to travel, not only as a tourist, but also to research and report what he found visiting Europe, America and giving book readings throughout Britain. He did not seem content to rest late in his career when he had attained wealth and comfort and continued travelling locally, walking the streets of London in the mould of the flâneur, a 'gentleman stroller of city streets'. He often suffered from insomnia and his night-time wanderings gave him an insight into some of the hidden aspects of Victorian London, details of which he also incorporated into his novels.