Dickens

Charles Dickens

"This clear-sighted biography and literary study examines Dickens the novelist in all his glory. It begins with the life: its often tragic as well as comic dimensions. Brian Murray analyzes the important influence of Dickens's early professional experiences as a journalist. (It was as a reporter that Dickens encountered, and first wrote about, the great human problems of modern urban life that were to inform so much of his later work.) Also discussed is Dickens's fascination with the theater. Like any experienced playwright, he was always acutely aware of his audience. And the later reading tours, which became an obsession, were almost certainly an aspect of the same impulse." "Successive chapters discuss the great novels, from Pickwick to Edwin Drood. They are looked at in their social context and from the standpoint of character, narrative, and structure. Readings of novels such as Dombey and Son and Bleak House are of especial interest for their close analysis of sometimes neglected works." "At times, Dickens seems dated. But the large audience that exists for his work today, as it appears in various media, is proof of his teeming inventiveness and the universality of his themes. Humorist, satirist, muckraker, sentimentalist, tragedian, chronicler of humanity, Dickens continues to delight and to teach - to enlighten all of humanity."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Dickens and Daughter

Charles Dickens, the Writer and His Work

The Writers and their Work series contains three essays on Dickens, an account of biographical and critical studies by K.J. Fielding and appreciations of the early and the late novels by Trevor Blount and Barbara Hardy respectively. Professor Hardy's present essay, the third Writers and their Work Special, combines a biographical introduction with a complete survey of the novels, sketches, and other prose works. Dickens originally learned his craft as a journalist and the essay begins with a chapter on his first descriptions of London, Sketches by Boz: it traces the process whereby his observation of city life and social change gradually developed into an elaborate fictional technique. Of the early novels Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby are the most fully discussed, with especial attention to Dickens' insight into criminal psychology in the former. In the later novels, beginning with Bleak House, Hardy finds a closer unity of theme and structure, the result of the firmer grasp of social criticism which Dickens displays during the 1850's and 1860's. There had been plenty of exposure of contemporary injustices and abuses in the earlier fiction, but in the later the confrontation between rich and poor has become more urgent, the comedy less carefree, the comic and serious elements more closely blended. In these later novels too, Hardy notes an effort to bring the imagination more closely to bear upon the inner life of the principal characters. Dickens does not attempt the kind of novel which is shaped by inner action as George Eliot and Henry James were to do: he keeps an external focus on society but strives within this dimension for a fuller access to the inward conflicts of characters such as Edith in Dombey and Son and Pip in Great Expectations. Barbara Hardy (1924-2016) was Professor of English at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her publications include The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form; The Appropriate Form: An Essay on the Novel; Middlemarch: Critical Approaches to the Novel; Critical Essays on George Eliot; The Moral Art of Dickens; The Exposure of Luxury: Radical Themes in Thackeray; A Reading of Jane Austen; Tellers and Listeners: The Narrative Imagination; and The Advantages of Lyric, Particularities: Readings in George Eliot.