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.
Fascinated by them, unable to ignore them, and imaginatively stimulated by them, Charles Dickens was an acute and unsentimental reporter on the dogs he kept and encountered during a time when they were a burgeoning part of the nineteenth-century urban and domestic scene. As dogs inhabited Dickens's city, so too did they populate his fiction, journalism, and letters. In the first book-length work of criticism on Dickens's relationship to canines, Beryl Gray shows that dogs, real and invented, were intrinsic to Dickens's vision and experience of London and to his representations of its life.
Charles Dickens is one of Britain’s greatest writers. Through his writing he fought for better conditions for children and the poor, but most of all he is remembered today for his wonderful stories and his unforgettable characters
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.
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.
