Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons
In some ways, it is extremely difficult to pin down what makes Charles Dickens (1812-1870) a great writer. With a career than ran from 1836 to 1870, from Sketches by Boz to the unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens is the acknowledged master of the Victorian novel, sometimes considered second only to Shakespeare among the ranks of English language authors. But what makes him great? Why did he transcend his own century and find his way into so many aspects of contemporary popular culture?
As a way of perhaps narrowing the field, let us consider, for a moment, what weaknesses one might find in Dickens.
First of all, we might acknowledge his tendency to rely on coincidence. For instance, Oliver Twist ends entirely too neatly (but we wouldn't dream of giving it away). Also, Dickens' more sentimental aspects have not aged well. Of The Old Curiosity Shop, Oscar Wilde quipped, 'One would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without dissolving into tears…of laughter.' Dickens also has an unfortunate tendency to write very good, very beautiful, very dull heroines: Agnes in…
Subscribe to Charles Dickens
via RSS
| # | Resource Title | Description | Contributor |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Chimes: Dickens’s New Year Carol | This analysis is of a paragraph from Charles Dickens’s The Chimes, first… |
Julian Thompson |
| 2 | Nineteenth-Century Stuff: Dickens, Paperwork and Paper Sorrows | In this Open Day taster lecture, Sophie Ratcliffe investigates the material culture of the… | Sophie Ratcliffe |
| 3 | The Pickwick Papers | ebook version of The Pickwick Papers | |
| 4 | Pictures from Italy | ebook version of Pictures from Italy | |
| 5 | Nicholas Nickleby | ebook version of Nicholas Nickleby | |
| 6 | Great expectations | ebook version of Great expectations | |
| 7 | Dombey and Son | ebook version of Dombey and Son | |
| 8 | Martin Chuzzlewit | ebook version of Martin Chuzzlewit | |
| 9 | A Christmas carol in prose: being a ghost story of Christmas | ebook version of A Christmas carol in prose: being a ghost story of Christmas | |
| 10 | Victorian Realism and the Implied Reader | Michael Whitworth, English Faculty, Oxford University, gives a lecture at the English Faculty Open… | Michael Whitworth |