Charles Dickens - World's Greatest Classic Books

World's Greatest Classic Books Feature:

Charles Dickens

Featured works:

All Books Written By
Charles Dickens

BOOK LINKS
abebooks.co.uk.
A&E Shop
All-Ink.com
AlphaCraze.com
Amazon.ca
Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk
BookCloseOuts.com
Booksamillion.com
Chapters.ca
eCampus.com

MUSIC LINKS
Music123
OldGlory.com
PlayCentric
PosterNow
PushPosters
Tower Records

SEARCH THE WEB
looksmart.co.uk
People-Finder.com
Search. Get Paid. Be Smart.

Born: February 7, 1812, in Landport near Portsmouth, England

Died: June 9 1870, in Gadshill, London, England

Charles Dickens, who often used the pseudonym Boz, was the most popular English novelist and short-story writer of all time. His novels reflect his own experiences as a poor child in London and Kent. Because his father was imprisoned for debts, Dickens was forced into work at the age of nine. Although he attended school for two years, he was mostly self-educated. His work is heavily influenced by the works of his favourite authors, Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett. He also loved to read Gothic novels.

Before becoming a writer himself, Dickens worked as a legal clerk, court reporter and parliamentary reporter. These positions honed his skills as a concise and descriptive narrator.

With the success of Sketches by Boz, published in 1836, he married Catherine Hogarth. The couple stayed together for twenty-two years and had ten children. However, they eventually separated over Dickens' relationship with actress Ellen Ternan.

Like Sketches by Boz, Dickens continued to write a monthly series of comic vignettes with the Pickwick Papers. Critics feel that, because the works were published as a series, Dickens' work is less coherent than it might have been if he had been allowed to write his texts as more unifed entities.

With Dombey and Son and Oliver Twist, Dickens' style began to move away from comedy toward darker themes. He was one of the first to experiment with the use of symbolism to heighten narrative (for example, foggy streets were used to foreshadow an ominous event).

The most emphasis, however, has been placed on the works that Dickens wrote in the late period, such as Hard Times in 1854, Tale of Two Cities in 1859, and Great Expectations in 1861. At this time, Dickens' had developed his own unique style and was a master at depicting the human condition.

During his life, Dickens remained involved in humanitarian causes. He was involved in many charities and advocated the abolition of slavery. A stroke caused his death in 1870 and he was buried at Westminster Abbey.

David Copperfield

Great Expectations

Oliver Twist

A Tale Of Two Cities

Hard Times

Charles Dickens: A Penguin Life by Jane Smiley	With the delectable wit, unforgettable characters, and challenging themes that have won her a Pulitzer Prize and national bestseller status, Jane Smiley naturally finds a kindred spirit in the author of such classics as Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol. Because "his novels shaped his life as much as his life shaped his novels," Smiley's Charles Dickens is at once a sensitive profile of the great master and a fascinating meditation on the writing life. Smiley evokes Dickens as he might have seemed to his contemporaries: convivial, astute, boundlessly energetic - and lionized. As she makes clear, Dickens not only led the action-packed life of a prolific writer, editor, and family man, but, balancing the artistic and the commercial in his work, he also consciously sustained his status as one of the first modern "celebrities." Charles Dickens offers brilliant interpretations of almost all the major works, an exploration of Dickens's narrative techniques and his innovative voice and themes, and a reflection on how his richly varied lower-class cameos sprang from an experience and passion more personal than his public knew. Jane Smiley's own "demon narrative intelligence" (The Boston Globe) touches, too, on controversial details that include Dickens's obsession with money, his squabbles with publishers, his unhappy marriage, and the rumors of an affair. Here is a fresh look at the dazzling personality of a verbal magician and the fascinating times behind the classics we read in school and continue to enjoy today.

Charles Dickens by G. K. Chesterton	Chesterton asserts that Dickens was a great man and a great writer in this fascinating literary biography. He competently defends Dickens against the charges that he exaggerated too much and examines his writing in careful relation to his life. Chesterton's insight into Dickens and his work is an excellent introduction to the writing of one of the most important literary figures of English Literature. *About the Author* G K Chesterton has been described as one of the most unjustly neglected writers of our time. Born in 1874, he became a journalist and later began writing books and pamphlets. His work includes novels, literary and social criticism, political papers and spiritual essays in a style characterised by enormous wit, paradox, humility and wonder. He converted to Catholicism in 1922 and he explores the nature of spirituality in many of his books and essays, including the mighty Orthodoxy. Chesterton is one of the few authors who are genuinely timeless and whose work has as much relevance today as when it was written.

Charles Dickens: The Man Who Had Great Expectations by Diane Stanley	Charles Dickens is one of the world's greatest and best loved writers. To read Great Expectations, A Christmas Carol, or Nicholas Nickleby is to be drawn into a society that still seems fresh and real today: nineteenth-century London with its extraordinary extremes of wealth, progress, poverty, and despair. Dickens captures it all in plots that are by turns wildly comical, wonderfully melodramatic, and tragic to the point of tears. In his writing and later, in his dramatic readings, Charles Dickens was a master showman, mesmerizing the whole world. His novels are stuffed to bursting with unforgettable characters like Mr. Micawber, Ebineezer Scrooge, and Little Nell. Most affecting are his portraits of children abused and abandoned by the Industrial Age. David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and Tiny Tim are mirrors that reflect the twisted values of their time. The twists of Dickens's own life encompassed childhood suffering as well as international acclaim. When he was twelve, his father was consigned to debtors' prison and Charles to working in a blacking factory. Not twelve years later The Pickwick Papers would propel him toward literary stardom. In their lovingly researched, incisively written biography, illustrated with a lushness and attention to period detail of which Dickens would have approved, Diane Stanley and Peter Vennema illuminate his inspirations, his impact on nations of readers, and his gleaming genius that has only brightened with time. A handsome book on the beloved novelist. Dickens's troubled, well-documented life has plenty to interest children....Lucid, accessible....A lively, entertaining story for children who enjoy A Christmas Carol in its various guises....A must. *About the Author* Diane Stanley is the recipient of the 2000 Washington Post/Children's Book Guild Nonfiction Award for the body of her work. "There is no one like Diane Stanley...for picture-book biography -- she brings to the genre an uncanny ability to clarify and compress dense and tricky historical matter, scrupulous attention to visual and verbal nuances, and a self-fulfilling faith in her readers' intelligence" (Publishers Weekly). Diane Stanley and her husband, Peter Vennema, have worked together on other books in Diane's award-winning biography series, including Shaka: King Of The Zulus, Bard Of Avon: The Story Of William Shakespeare, and Charles Dickens: The Man Who Had Great Expectations. Diane has also illustrated The Last Princess: The Story Of Princess Ka'iulani Of Hawaii, by Fay Stanley, and she has written and illustrated Michelangelo, Peter The Great, Joan Of Arc, Leonardo Da Vinci, Cleopatra and Rumpelstiltskin's Daughter. Her first novel, A Time Apart, was selected as one of 1999's Top 10 First Novels by ALA Booklist. Diane Stanley and Peter Vennema live in Houston, Texas.

Dickens: A Biography by Fred Kaplan	Named a notable book of the year by the NEW YORK TIMES and one of the best biographies of 1988 by PUBLISHERS WEEKLY "Anyone who has not read a life of Dickens is going to prefer Fred Kaplan's long, solid, and illuminating biography, furnished with new facts and theories, to any previous one they might encounter. The novelist who emerges from his study - dynamic, mercurial, self-deluding, with a big heart for the masses and a small one for his ego, makes fascinating reading." - Louis Auchincloss, Newsday "Kaplan has spent ten years preparing and writing this book; his achievement is as rare, as wonderful, as the Dickens he brings to life. We are all the beneficiaries of thie exceptional biography." - A. D. Hutter, Los Angeles Times From a bitter childhood mired in poverty and hard work to a career as the most acclaimed and best-loved writer in the English-speaking world, Charles Dickens had a life as tumultuous as any he created in his teeming novels of life in Victorian England. And no one has captured the rich texture of this life as colorfully and persuasively as Fred Kaplan in this acclaimed biography. Brilliantly written and thoroughly researched, Dickens provides an absorbing and perceptive account of its subject as a singularly complex man and a consummate artist, offering readers new insights into Dickens' - and literature's - greatest works, such as Bleak House, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, and Oliver Twist. Fred Kaplan is the author of Miracles of Rare Devices, Dickens and Mesmerism, Thomas Carlyle: A Biography (nominated for the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize). Sacred Tears, and Henry James: A Biography, and is the editor of Charles Dickens' Book of Memoranda. A past recipient of Guggenheim and NEH fellowships, he has also served as editor of the Dickens Studies Annual.