The Mystery of Charles Dickens

The Mystery of Charles Dickens PDF Author: A.N. Wilson
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062954962
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
Winner of the Plutarch Award for Best Biography A lively and insightful biographical celebration of the imaginative genius of Charles Dickens, published in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of his death. Charles Dickens was a superb public performer, a great orator and one of the most famous of the Eminent Victorians. Slight of build, with a frenzied, hyper-energetic personality, Dickens looked much older than his fifty-eight years when he died—an occasion marked by a crowded funeral at Westminster Abbey, despite his waking wishes for a small affair. Experiencing the worst and best of life during the Victorian Age, Dickens was not merely the conduit through whom some of the most beloved characters in literature came into the world. He was one of them. Filled with the twists, pathos, and unusual characters that sprang from this novelist’s extraordinary imagination, The Mystery of Charles Dickens looks back from the legendary writer’s death to recall the key events in his life. In doing so, he seeks to understand Dickens’ creative genius and enduring popularity. Following his life from cradle to grave, it becomes clear that Dickens’s fiction drew from his life—a fact he acknowledged. Like Oliver Twist, Dickens suffered a wretched childhood, then grew up to become not only a respectable gentleman but an artist of prodigious popularity. Dickens knew firsthand the poverty and pain his characters endured, including the scandal of a failed marriage. Going beyond standard narrative biography, A. N. Wilson brilliantly revisits the wellspring of Dickens’s vast and wild imagination, to reveal at long last why his novels captured the hearts of nineteenth century readers—and why they continue to resonate today. The Mystery of Charles Dickens is illustrated with 30 black-and-white images.

The Mystery of Charles Dickens

The Mystery of Charles Dickens PDF Author: A.N. Wilson
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062954962
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 343

Get Book Here

Book Description
Winner of the Plutarch Award for Best Biography A lively and insightful biographical celebration of the imaginative genius of Charles Dickens, published in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of his death. Charles Dickens was a superb public performer, a great orator and one of the most famous of the Eminent Victorians. Slight of build, with a frenzied, hyper-energetic personality, Dickens looked much older than his fifty-eight years when he died—an occasion marked by a crowded funeral at Westminster Abbey, despite his waking wishes for a small affair. Experiencing the worst and best of life during the Victorian Age, Dickens was not merely the conduit through whom some of the most beloved characters in literature came into the world. He was one of them. Filled with the twists, pathos, and unusual characters that sprang from this novelist’s extraordinary imagination, The Mystery of Charles Dickens looks back from the legendary writer’s death to recall the key events in his life. In doing so, he seeks to understand Dickens’ creative genius and enduring popularity. Following his life from cradle to grave, it becomes clear that Dickens’s fiction drew from his life—a fact he acknowledged. Like Oliver Twist, Dickens suffered a wretched childhood, then grew up to become not only a respectable gentleman but an artist of prodigious popularity. Dickens knew firsthand the poverty and pain his characters endured, including the scandal of a failed marriage. Going beyond standard narrative biography, A. N. Wilson brilliantly revisits the wellspring of Dickens’s vast and wild imagination, to reveal at long last why his novels captured the hearts of nineteenth century readers—and why they continue to resonate today. The Mystery of Charles Dickens is illustrated with 30 black-and-white images.

Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens PDF Author: Claire Tomalin
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141971452
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 633

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Book Description
THE ACCLAIMED DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY OF ONE OF THE GREATEST BRITISH WRITERS OF ALL TIME Charles Dickens was a phenomenon: a journalist, a father of ten, a supporter of liberal social causes, but most of all, a great novelist. From unpromising beginnings sent to work a black factory age twelve, he rose to such social and literary heights that when he died, the world mourned. Yet the brilliance concealed a divided character: a republican, he disliked America; sentimental about the family, he took up with a young actress; usually generous, he cut off his impecunious children. From the award-winning author Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens: A Life paints an unforgettable portrait of Dickens, capturing brilliantly the complex character of this great genius. If you loved Great Expectations, Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol, this book is invaluable reading. 'By far the most humane and imaginatively sympathetic account yet for the general reader' Amanda Craig, New Statesman

The Mystery of Charles Dickens

The Mystery of Charles Dickens PDF Author: John Paulits
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited
ISBN: 1780921799
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 147

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Book Description
History records that on June 9, 1870, Charles Dickens died of a cerebral haemorrhage. History, however, is wrong. June 9, 1870, is the day on which Emile de la Rue murdered Charles Dickens. During a stay in Genoa in 1844-45, Charles Dickens, an accomplished mesmerist, used his mesmeric abilities to treat a young Englishwoman, Augusta de la Rue, attempting to cure a years' long malady of hers that included facial spasms and phantom-filled dreams. During her trances she revealed to Dickens a truth she had long suppressed the knowledge that her husband murdered a rival so he could have her for himself. Dickens, at that time, was helpless to act on the devastating admission, but twenty-five years later Emile de la Rue shows up in London, and Dickens finally seeks justice. De La Rue cannot let this happen and stops at nothing to keep Dickens from revealing his secret.

A Boy Called Dickens

A Boy Called Dickens PDF Author: Deborah Hopkinson
Publisher: Schwartz & Wade
ISBN: 0375987401
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 41

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Book Description
For years Dickens kept the story of his own childhood a secret. Yet it is a story worth telling. For it helps us remember how much we all might lose when a child's dreams don't come true . . . As a child, Dickens was forced to live on his own and work long hours in a rat-infested blacking factory. Readers will be drawn into the winding streets of London, where they will learn how Dickens got the inspiration for many of his characters. The 200th anniversary of Dickens's birth was February 7, 2012, and this tale of his little-known boyhood is the perfect way to introduce kids to the great author. This Booklist Best Children's Book of the Year is historical fiction at its ingenious best.

What-the-Dickens

What-the-Dickens PDF Author: Gregory Maguire
Publisher: Candlewick Press
ISBN: 0763629618
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
As a terrible storm rages, ten-year-old Dinah and her brother and sister listen to their cousin Gage's tale of a newly-hatched, orphaned, skibberee, or tooth fairy, called What-the-Dickens, who hopes to find a home among the skibbereen tribe, if only he can stay out of trouble.

A Midnight Carol

A Midnight Carol PDF Author: Patricia K. Davis
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1466883618
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
A novel based on the true story of the struggle Charles Dickens faced during the winter of 1843 while writing his now-classic holiday tale, A Christmas Carol 1843, London. Though the approaching Christmas looks bleak at the home of the Dickens family, Charles and his pregnant wife Catherine try to maintain a good cheer for their four young children. Debts are mounting, food is scarce, and Charles' books—according to his miserly publisher—are no longer selling. Then Charles has an idea, which comes to him in the ghostly form of Oliver Cromwell, the long-dead, spirit-crushing, Lord Protector of England. A Christmas Carol will be Dickens' most brilliant work yet, both for its mass appeal and underlying political message. But many sinister forces oppose the success of this literary gem; and it is only through faith, kindness and the innate goodness of mankind that A Christmas Carol will become a timeless classic—and that the young writer Charles Dickens will truly save Christmas for all of England... Find the true story in A Midnight Carol by Patricia K. Davis, sure to become a brand new Christmas classic.

Our Mutual Friend

Our Mutual Friend PDF Author: Charles Dickens
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


The Secret of Dickens

The Secret of Dickens PDF Author: William Walter Crotch
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English prose literature
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description


Dickens and the Workhouse

Dickens and the Workhouse PDF Author: Ruth Richardson
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191624136
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
The recent discovery that as a young man Charles Dickens lived only a few doors from a major London workhouse made headlines worldwide, and the campaign to save the workhouse from demolition caught the public imagination. Internationally, the media immediately grasped the idea that Oliver Twist's workhouse had been found, and made public the news that both the workhouse and Dickens's old home were still standing, near London's Telecom Tower. This book, by the historian who did the sleuthing behind these exciting new findings, presents the story for the first time, and shows that the two periods Dickens lived in that part of London - before and after his father's imprisonment in a debtors' prison - were profoundly important to his subsequent writing career.

The Invisible Woman

The Invisible Woman PDF Author: Claire Tomalin
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307822397
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 477

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Book Description
Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan met in 1857; she was 18, a hard-working actress performing in his production of The Frozen Deep, and he was 45, the most lionized writer in England. Out of their meeting came a love affair that lasted thirteen years and destroyed Dickens’s marriage while effacing Nelly Ternan from the public record. In this remarkable work of biography and scholarly reconstruction, the acclaimed biographer of Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys and Jane Austen rescues Nelly from the shadows of history, not only returning the neglected actress to her rightful place, but also providing a compelling portrait of the great Victorian novelist himself. The result is a thrilling literary detective story and a deeply compassionate work that encompasses all those women who were exiled from the warm, well-lighted parlors of Victorian England.