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Professor Barbara Hardy is a noted critic of nineteenth-century fiction but her essays on Dickens have hitherto been scattered widely among critical journals and anthologies. The seven studies she has here collected, introduced, and in part revised, together make up a sustained exploration of the moral concern which informs the novelist's work and gives to his portrayal of society and the individual its unique quality. A general discussion of the moral nature of Dickens' art leads to a study of patterns of change and conversion and this in turn to a close examination of four representative novels: Pickwick Papers, Martin Chuzzlewit, David Copperfield, and Great Expectations.
Professor Barbara Hardy is a noted critic of nineteenth-century fiction but her essays on Dickens have hitherto been scattered widely among critical journals and anthologies. The seven studies she has here collected, introduced, and in part revised, together make up a sustained exploration of the moral concern which informs the novelist's work and gives to his portrayal of society and the individual its unique quality. A general discussion of the moral nature of Dickens' art leads to a study of patterns of change and conversion and this in turn to a close examination of four representative novels: Pickwick Papers, Martin Chuzzlewit, David Copperfield, and Great Expectations.
'I have a more or less irresistible passion for books' Vincent van GoghVincent van Gogh (1853-1890) was famously driven by his passion for God, for art - and for books. Vincent's life with books is examined here chapter by chapter, from his early adulthood, when he considered becoming a pastor, to his decision to be a painter, to the end of his life. He moved from Holland to Paris to Provence; at each moment, ideas he encountered in books defined and guided his thoughts and his life. Vincent's letters to his brother refer to at least 200 authors. Books and readers - whether dreaming or deeply absorbed - are frequent subjects of his paintings.Vincent not only read fiction, he also knew many works of art from detailed descriptions and illustrations in monographs, biographies and museum guides. Always keeping up to date, he never missed the latest literary and artistic magazines. This thought-provoking and original study takes the reader on an artistic-literary journey through Vincent's discoveries, his favourite authors and best-loved books, revealing a continuous dialogue between his own work, the artists and the authors who inspired him, and giving life to his comment: 'Books and reality and art are the same kind of thing for me.'
This book provides a clear method of study which encourages students to construct their own interpretation of any of Dicken's novels. It helps students to identify a novel's major thematic concerns and interests and to argue a case purely from the evidence of the text. But it also moves beyond a straighforwardly thematic analysis to consider how a novel is put together and how it works. This in turn provides students with a way of identifying the distinctiveness of Dickens's fiction and with a way of structuring an intelligent critical response to any of his novels.
Dickens and Victorian Psychology: Introspection, First-Person Narration, and the Mind positions Charles Dickens's fiction in the midst of Victorian psychological debate, tracking Dickens's increasing reliance over the course of his career on the introspective mode, those moments—from free indirect discourse to first-person narration—in which Dickens attempts to represent the inner view of his characters' minds. In the middle of the nineteenth century, introspection remained the central investigative method for dualist psychologies, theories that tied the mind's immortality to its immateriality. Because those psychologies found evidence of the mind's ontological difference from the body in the subjective experience of consciousness, this book argues that the moments of inwardness in Dickens's fiction, in both their form and their content, constitute efforts to resist the encroachment of psycho-physiology by making a case for the mind's transcendence of the body. Yet Dickens and Victorian Psychology also shows the consequences of a material psychology's appropriation of such an inward view—as well as the results of the efforts by psycho-physiologists to redefine the terminology of a mainstream dualism—by tracing the ambiguities and contradictions that find their way into Dickens's representations of the mind. In these ways, this book reveals an overlooked context for Dickens's experiments with narrative point of view and broadens our understanding of the strategies that a material psychology used to assuage the anxieties of those who saw psycho-physiology as a threat to immortality.
Although enjoyed my many as a masterpiece of Dickens’ comic writing, Martin Chuzzlewit has long been underrated by professional critics. This volume redresses the balance by devoting its attention to a full critical discussion of the novel and by including a full survey of the critical positions held in the past. As well as discussing the themes of selfishness and hypocrisy, the history of the text is also explored, as is the complex relationship between Dickens and the United States which played a great part in the development of the novel and exerted considerable influence on it early reception.
From 1837 to 1912, Charles Dickens was by far the most popular writer for American readers. Through several sources including statistics, literary biography, newspapers, memoirs, diaries, letters, and interviews, Robert McParland examines a historical time and an emerging national consciousness that defined the American identity before and after the Civil War. American voices present their views, tastes, emotional reactions and identifications, and deep attachment and love for Dickens's characters, stories, themes, and sensibilities as well as for the man himself. Bringing together contemporary reactions to Dickens and his works, this book paints a portrait of the American people and of American society and culture from 1837 to the turn of the twentieth century. It is in this view of nineteenth-century America--its people and their values, their reading habits and cultural views, the scenarios of their everyday lives even in the face of the drastic changes of the emerging nation--that Charles Dickens's American Audience makes its greatest impact.
A magnificent new biography of the man who gave us David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and Ebenezer Scrooge This long-awaited biography, twenty years after the last major account, uncovers Dickens the man through the profession in which he excelled. Drawing on a lifetime's study of this prodigiously brilliant figure, Michael Slater explores the personal and emotional life, the high-profile public activities, the relentless travel, the charitable works, the amateur theatricals and the astonishing productivity. But the core focus is Dickens' career as a writer and professional author, covering not only his big novels but also his phenomenal output of other writing--letters, journalism, shorter fiction, plays, verses, essays, writings for children, travel books, speeches, and scripts for his public readings, and the relationships among them. Slater's account, rooted in deep research but written with affection, clarity, and economy, illuminates the context of each of the great novels while locating the life of the author within the imagination that created them. It highlights Dickens' boundless energy, his passion for order and fascination with disorder, his organizational genius, his deep concern for the poor and outrage at indifference towards them, his susceptibility towards young women, his love of Christmas and fairy tales, and his hatred of tyranny. Richly and precisely illustrated with many rare images, this masterly work on the complete Dickens, man and writer, becomes the indispensable guide and companion to one of the greatest novelists in the language.
The importance of understanding Dickens's religion to obtain a full appreciation of his achievement has long been admitted; but this is the first critical study of the interaction between Dickens's religious beliefs and his creative imagination throughout his career. The novelist's religious beliefs are a pervasive and deeply felt presence in his works even if they are not always clearly thought out or expressed. Too discreet and humane to be as explicit, or as dull, as most of the professedly religious novelists of his time, Dickens nevertheless suggests in his own way a liberal Protestant belief, shot through with Romantic, transcendental yearnings, which undoubtedly appealed to a very wide range of readers. Dickens's religion is shown to be that of a great popular writer, who created a unique kind of fiction, and a unique relationship with his readers, by the absorption and transformation of less respectable contemporary forms, from fairy-tale and German romance to tract and print. Walder's thoroughly researched and lively book provides students of Dickens and the Victorian period with an original perspective on the novelist's methods and attitudes. He offers a judicious and informed exploration of Dickens's obsessive themes, from the 'fall' of innocence in Pickwick Papers, to the search for a religious 'answer' in Little Dorrit. Each chapter focuses upon the striking congruences revealed between individual novels, or groups of novels, and particular religious themes. The views expressed in Dickens's lesser fiction and non-fiction are drawn on throughout, as are those in the influential contemporary press.