CHARLES DICKENS MISCELLANY

The world of Dickens was wonderfully strange. Miss Havisham of Great Expectations lives her wedding day, every day, in a state of ghastly corruption; Crook (Bleak House) drinks so much gin he bursts into flames and covers the area with greasy flakes of soot; young Bailey (Martin Chuzzlewit) goes for a shave so he has not a trace of a beard; Good Mrs Brown (Dombey and Son) steals the young heroine's clothes and sends her out in rags; the starving runaway David (David Copperfield) sells his jacket to a man who grabs him by the hair and repays him in instalments of a halfpenny a time, and Jenny Wren (Our Mutual Friend) sits on the roof and says 'Come up and be dead!' Dickens had a furious energy, an eye on his audience, his money and his art, and rarely has any artist been so ready to engage with life as it was lived in his time. The dying children, desperate orphans, 'fallen' women, the pantomime villains, pure heroines and cardboard heroes we meet in his novels were the vital elements that shaped his whole work. This miscellany explores his busy and diverse life, allowing us to get to know the man through his work and its major themes. With carefully choses quotations from the novels, and also from his Sketches and journalism, here is what he had to say on the big issues like crime, family, education and money, moral convictions, passionate indignation and mad humour. 130pp, illus.