Writers, Readers, and Reputations - Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918
Charles Dickens died in 1870, the same year in which universal elementary education was introduced. During the following generation a mass reading public emerged, and the term "best-seller" was coined. In new and cheap editions Dickens's stories sold hugely, but these were progressively outstripped in quantity by the likes of Hall Caine and Marie Corelli, Charles Garvice and Nat Gould. Who has now heard of these writers? Yet Hall Caine, for one, boasted of having made more money from his pen than any previous author.
Volume Fourteen treats a wide range of authors from the past and present. Among them are several interesting but neglected authors from the nineteenth century, including Charles W. Chesnutt, the black novelist, Logan Pearsall Smith, the essayist and critic, and Alain Locke, the black critic, historian, and editor.
To what extent did Charles Dickens see himself as a medium of forces beyond his conscious control? What did he think such subconscious mechanisms might be, and how did his thoughts on the subject play out in his writings? Sensation and Sublimation in Charles Dickens traces these questions through three Dickens novels: Oliver Twist , Dombey and Son , and Bleak House . It is the first book-length study to approach Dickensian psychology from the vantage point of what the speculations of Dickens’s—rather than of our own—had to say about mental phenomena, both normal and abnormal.
Here is the only affordable selection of Clarendon's classic History of the Rebellion currently in print, and the first popular edition since 1953. Written by one of the closest advisers to Charles I and Charles II, Clarendon's History contains a remarkably frank account of the inadequacies of royalist policy-making as well as an astute analysis of the principles and practice of government.
Charles Fletcher Lummis began his spectacular career in 1884 by walking from Ohio to start a new job at the three-year old Los Angeles Times. By the time of his death in 1928, the 3,500 mile "tramp across the continent" was just a footnote in his astonishingly varied career: crusading journalist, author of nearly two dozen books, editor of the influential political and literary magazine Out West, Los Angeles city librarian, preserver of Spanish missions, and Indian rights gadfly. Lummis both embodied and defined our vision of the West, and of America itself.
