Sheltering from a summer downpour, you encounter the ghost of Charles Dickens. Join him for a chat in the inn beloved by Mr Pickwick and be swept away by his vigour, warmth and humanity. You’ll feel as if you’ve known him all your life. The great novelist Charles Dickens attracted international adulation on an unprecedented scale. He cultivated a genial intimacy with his readers, and after he died many of his admirers felt that they had lost a personal friend. Sit back and listen to this master conversationalist talk about everything from work in a boot-polish factory to lecture tours in America. Who could possibly ask for more?
Hard Times is Dickens's shortest novel, and arguably his greatest triumph. A useful appendix of the author's working notes, together with an enlightening introduction and full explanatory notes, will ensure that this edition becomes the obvious choice for anyone studying the novel. Paul Schlike is Lecturer in English at the University of Aberdeen. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
“This is one of the best short introductions to Dickens's life and work that I know. Paul Schlicke integrates the life of this extraordinary man with his fiction, journalism, and public readings in a very engaging and lively narrative. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this to the widest range of readers.” —Malcolm Andrews, Emeritus Professor Victorian & Visual Arts, University of Kent, Editor of The Dickensian Oliver Twist. A Christmas Carol. David Copperfield. Bleak House. A Tale of Two Cities. Great Expectations. The novels of Charles Dickens (1812–1870) read like a “Who’s Who” of canonical works. Yet, less well known is the fact that Dickens himself was something of a created character, a larger-than-life figure who lived through his art and pursued his many passions with a theatrical zeal that could have belonged to one of his famous protagonists. Largely self-taught, with little formal education, Dickens was catapulted to fame at the age of 24 with the publication of The Pickwick Papers in 1836. For the next 30 years, he wrote a prodigious number of novels, short stories, essays, and other works, while simultaneously campaigning for a variety of social reforms. As Simply Dickens colorfully describes, in life and in art, Dickens threw himself into everything he undertook—from taking on the personalities of his characters as he wrote, to pursuing such causes as children’s rights and universal education. While some authors have depicted Dickens as a tormented soul or cruel misogynist who compromised his work by pandering to a wide audience, Simply Dickens convincingly shows him as a purposeful, supremely talented, and versatile personality, whose popular appeal was central to his achievement.
First published in 1985. Dickens was a vigorous champion of the right of all men and women to carefree amusements and dedicated himself to the creation of imaginative pleasure. This book represents the first extended study of this vital aspect of Dickens’ life and work, exploring how he channelled his love of entertainment into his artistry. This study offers a challenging reassessment of Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop and Hard Times. It shows the importance of entertainment to Dickens’ journalism and presents an illuminating perspective on the public readings which dominated the last twelve years of his life. This book will be of interest to students of literature.
Discover through a quiet chat with his ghost the scintillating life, career, eccentricities and trenchant opinions of Charles Dickens. He was an undisputed genius whose novels have remained enduringly popular all around the world, amusing and moving his readers in equal measure.
First published in 1985. Dickens was a vigorous champion of the right of all men and women to carefree amusements and dedicated himself to the creation of imaginative pleasure. This book represents the first extended study of this vital aspect of Dickens’ life and work, exploring how he channelled his love of entertainment into his artistry. This study offers a challenging reassessment of Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop and Hard Times. It shows the importance of entertainment to Dickens’ journalism and presents an illuminating perspective on the public readings which dominated the last twelve years of his life. This book will be of interest to students of literature.
Sheltering from a summer downpour, you encounter the ghost of Charles Dickens. Join him for a chat in the inn beloved by Mr Pickwick and be swept away by his vigour, warmth and humanity. You’ll feel as if you’ve known him all your life. The great novelist Charles Dickens attracted international adulation on an unprecedented scale. He cultivated a genial intimacy with his readers, and after he died many of his admirers felt that they had lost a personal friend. Sit back and listen to this master conversationalist talk about everything from work in a boot-polish factory to lecture tours in America. Who could possibly ask for more?
“This is one of the best short introductions to Dickens's life and work that I know. Paul Schlicke integrates the life of this extraordinary man with his fiction, journalism, and public readings in a very engaging and lively narrative. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this to the widest range of readers.” —Malcolm Andrews, Emeritus Professor Victorian & Visual Arts, University of Kent, Editor of The Dickensian Oliver Twist. A Christmas Carol. David Copperfield. Bleak House. A Tale of Two Cities. Great Expectations. The novels of Charles Dickens (1812–1870) read like a “Who’s Who” of canonical works. Yet, less well known is the fact that Dickens himself was something of a created character, a larger-than-life figure who lived through his art and pursued his many passions with a theatrical zeal that could have belonged to one of his famous protagonists. Largely self-taught, with little formal education, Dickens was catapulted to fame at the age of 24 with the publication of The Pickwick Papers in 1836. For the next 30 years, he wrote a prodigious number of novels, short stories, essays, and other works, while simultaneously campaigning for a variety of social reforms. As Simply Dickens colorfully describes, in life and in art, Dickens threw himself into everything he undertook—from taking on the personalities of his characters as he wrote, to pursuing such causes as children’s rights and universal education. While some authors have depicted Dickens as a tormented soul or cruel misogynist who compromised his work by pandering to a wide audience, Simply Dickens convincingly shows him as a purposeful, supremely talented, and versatile personality, whose popular appeal was central to his achievement.
On the banks of the Thames it is a tremendous chapter of accidents'. As Henry James surveys London in 1888, he sums up what had fascinated urban observers for a century: the random and even accidental development of this unprecedented form of human settlement, the modern metropolis. By Accident or Design: Writing the Victorian Metropolis takes James at his word, arguing that accident was both a powerful metaphor and material context through which the Victorians arrested the paradoxes of metropolitan modernity and reconfigured understandings of form and change. Paul Fyfe shows how the material conditions of urban accidents offer new and compelling modes of analysis for intellectual and literary history. Through extensive archival study and interdisciplinary analysis of urban-industrial accidents, risk management, and civic improvements, By Accident or Design reclaims the metropolis as ground zero for some of the most important thinking about causation in the nineteenth century. It demonstrates the centrality of interdependent concepts of design and accident not only to metropolitan discourse, but also to current critical discourse about the formal and circulatory dynamics of Victorian metropolitan writing. Thus, this book offers a new vocabulary for the dialectics of the modern city and the signature forms of writing about it, including the newspaper, the illustrated periodical, the industrial novel, and urban broadsheets.
The existence of German-speaking units fighting for the Allied cause during WW2 has remained largely a well-kept secret. But seventy-five years on these units’ contribution to victory needs to be fully acknowledged. Prime Minister Winston Churchill had no qualms about using native German speakers from Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia and of course Germany itself. The majority were Jews who had fled persecution. Two examples of these secret units were X Troop Commandos and the Special Interrogation Group. The SIG men deserve their legendary status. They fought, and often died, wearing Wehmacht uniform. As this superbly researched book reveals that, after infiltrating Field Marshal Rommel’s Afrika Korps, one detachment even drew Nazi pay. Inevitably once the existence of SIG units became known, their immediate execution on capture was ordered, unless their temporary reprieve would reveal intelligence under torture. We learn how Churchill’s initiative was copied by both the Americans and the Russians. Post-war SIG and X Troop survivors joined British special forces or were used to hunt down Nazi war criminals. All this and more is covered in this ground-breaking book by a writer who is both a leading historian and foreign correspondent.
This book explores the relationship between Dickens’s novels and the financial system. Elements of Dickens’s work form a critique of financial capitalism. This critique is rooted in the difference between use-value and exchange-value, and in the difference between productive circulations and mere accumulation. In a money-based society, exchange-value and accumulation dominate to the point where they infect even the most important and sacred relationships between parts of society and individuals. This study explores Dickens’s critique from two very different points of view. The first is philosophical, from Aristotle’s distinction between "chrematistic" accumulation and "economic" use on money through Marx’s focus on the teleology of capitalism as death. The second view is that of nineteenth-century financial journalism, of "City" writers like David Morier Evans and M. L. Meason,, who, while functioning as "cheerleaders" for financial capitalism, also reflected some of the very real "dis-ease" associated with capital formation and accumulation. The core concepts of this critique are constant in the novels, but the critique broadens and becomes more pessimistic over time. The ill effects of living in a money-based society are presented more as the consequences of individual evil in earlier novels, while in the later books they are depicted as systemic and pervasive. Texts discussed include Nicholas Nickleby, A Christmas Carol, Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend.
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