Author: Charles Dickens
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 9780191590276
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 850

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Book Description
This final volume presents 1,151 letters, many previously unpublished or published only in part, for the years 1868 to Dickens's death from a stroke on 9 June 1870; also included is an Addenda of 235 letters belonging to earlier volumes, discovered since the publication of the first such collection in Volume 7, and a Cumulative Index of Correspondents for the entire edition. The volume begins with the final four months of Dickens's American tour of 75 readings, which had been conspicuously successful throughout, despite the appalling weather and his sufferings from "American" catarrh. The tour culminated on 18 April 1868 when the American Press held a dinner in his honour in New York. In July he rented Windsor Lodge, Peckham for Ellen Ternan, where she remained until after his death; he was to give two more English reading tours before his collapse at Preston on 22 April 1869. In early January 1869 he was elected President of the Birmingham and Midland Institute; and a dinner in his honour was given in St George's Hall, Liverpool. Between January and March 1870 he gave a series of Farewell readings in London, and on 31 March Edwin Drood, No. 1 was published, illustrated by Luke Fildes; it continued monthly until 31 August. Of the friends who died during this period, much the closest were the painter Daniel Maclise, to whom Dickens paid especial tribute at the Royal Academy Banquet of 30 April 1870; Mark Lemon, who died only 18 days before Dickens himself, and with whom he had a brief reconciliation after their bitter quarrel in 1858; and Chauncy Hare Townshend, who left him £2,000 to publish, as his Literary Executor, Religious Opinions of the Late Chauncy Hare Townshend, which appeared in November 1870.

Author: George Augustus Sala
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Authors, English
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description

Author: Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674253736
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Becoming Dickens tells the story of how an ambitious young Londoner became England’s greatest novelist. In following the twists and turns of Charles Dickens’s early career, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst examines a remarkable double transformation: in reinventing himself Dickens reinvented the form of the novel. It was a high-stakes gamble, and Dickens never forgot how differently things could have turned out. Like the hero of Dombey and Son, he remained haunted by “what might have been, and what was not.” In his own lifetime, Dickens was without rivals. He styled himself simply “The Inimitable.” But he was not always confident about his standing in the world. From his traumatized childhood to the suicide of his first collaborator and the sudden death of the woman who had a good claim to being the love of his life, Dickens faced powerful obstacles. Before settling on the profession of novelist, he tried his hand at the law and journalism, considered a career in acting, and even contemplated emigrating to the West Indies. Yet with The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and a groundbreaking series of plays, sketches, and articles, he succeeded in turning every potential breakdown into a breakthrough. Douglas-Fairhurst’s provocative new biography, focused on the 1830s, portrays a restless and uncertain Dickens who could not decide on the career path he should take and would never feel secure in his considerable achievements.

Author: Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0525655956
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
A major new biography that takes an unusual and illuminating approach to the great writer—immersing us in one year of his life—from the award-winning author of Becoming Dickens and The Story of Alice. The year is 1851. It's a time of radical change in Britain, when industrial miracles and artistic innovations rub shoulders with political unrest, poverty, and disease. It is also a turbulent year in the private life of Charles Dickens, as he copes with a double bereavement and early signs that his marriage is falling apart. But this formative year will become perhaps the greatest turning point in Dickens's career, as he embraces his calling as a chronicler of ordinary people's lives and develops a new form of writing that will reveal just how interconnected the world is becoming. The Turning Point transports us into the foggy streets of Dickens's London, closely following the twists and turns of a year that would come to define him and forever alter Britain's relationship with the world. Fully illustrated, and brimming with fascinating details about the larger-than-life man who wrote Bleak House, this is the closest look yet at one of the greatest literary personalities ever to have lived.

Author: Rosemary Ashton
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300231199
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
A unique, in-depth view of Victorian London during the record-breaking summer of 1858, when residents both famous and now-forgotten endured “The Great Stink” together While 1858 in London may have been noteworthy for its broiling summer months and the related stench of the sewage-filled Thames River, the year is otherwise little remembered. And yet, historian Rosemary Ashton reveals in this compelling microhistory, 1858 was marked by significant, if unrecognized, turning points. For ordinary people, and also for the rich, famous, and powerful, the months from May to August turned out to be a summer of consequence. Ashton mines Victorian letters and gossip, diaries, court records, newspapers, and other contemporary sources to uncover historically crucial moments in the lives of three protagonists—Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, and Benjamin Disraeli. She also introduces others who gained renown in the headlines of the day, among them George Eliot, Karl Marx, William Thackeray, and Edward Bulwer Lytton. Ashton reveals invisible threads of connection among Londoners at every social level in 1858, bringing the celebrated city and its citizens vibrantly to life.

Author: New Zealand gen. assembly, libr
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 498

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Author: American Art Association, Anderson Galleries (Firm)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 1246

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Author: Ralph Pite
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040129250
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
Collected here are the biographies which revealed aspects of their subjects that the more favourable "official" accounts tended to hide. The life of the author of each text is described, and their relation to the writers they portray is sketched in.

Author: Claire Tomalin
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101547995
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 575

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Book Description
Award-winning Claire Tomalin, author of A Life of My Own, sets the standard for sophisticated and popular biography, having written lives of Jane Austen, Samuel Pepys, and Thomas Hardy, among others. Here she tackles the best recognized and loved man of nineteenth-century England, Charles Dickens; a literary leviathan whose own difficult path to greatness inspired the creation of classic novels such as Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and Hard Times. From his sensational public appearances to the obsessive love affair that led him to betray, deceive, and break with those closest to him, Charles Dickens: A Life is a triumph of the biographer’s craft, a comedy that turns to tragedy in a story worthy of Dickens’ own pen.

Author: Jim Davis
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587294028
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
This innovative work begins to fill a large gap in theatre studies: the lack of any comprehensive study of nineteenth-century British theatre audiences. In an attempt to bring some order to the enormous amount of available primary material, Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow focus on London from 1840, immediately prior to the deregulation of that city's theatres, to 1880, when the Metropolitan Board of Works assumed responsibility for their licensing. In a further attempt to manage their material, they concentrate chapter by chapter on seven representative theatres from four areas: the Surrey Theatre and the Royal Victoria to the south, the Whitechapel Pavilion and the Britannia Theatre to the east, Sadler's Wells and the Queen's (later the Prince of Wales's) to the north, and Drury Lane to the west. Davis and Emeljanow thoroughly examine the composition of these theatres' audiences, their behavior, and their attendance patterns by looking at topography, social demography, police reports, playbills, autobiographies and diaries, newspaper accounts, economic and social factors as seen in census returns, maps and transportation data, and the managerial policies of each theatre.