Search results for ""author dick"

‘A tender story of love, loss, healing and hope’ LAURA KEMP‘Alternately heartbreaking and heartwarming. I loved it’ NICOLA GILL'A beautiful, poignant tale of family, friendship, loss and love' MILLY JOHNSON'A life-affirming love story full of hope and heart' KATIE MARSH'A poignant story about life after loss, and how well we truly know the people closest to us. Heartbreaking, heartwarming, uplifting - I loved it' HOLLY MILLER'Heartfelt, painfully real, thoughtful and uplifting. I loved it!' EMILY STONE‘A warm, relatable read that will make you smile despite the lump in your throat’ ROSIE BLAKE‘A bittersweet story of loss and discovery. The One is as heart-warming as a hug, but with a sucker punch of powerful emotion’ IONA GREY'Such a heartwarming read' SARAH TURNERWhat happens when you lose the love of your life just three months after you meet him?Lottie Brown has finally found The One. Leo is everything she’s ever wanted – he’s handsome, kind, funny and totally gets her. Three months into their relationship, Lottie is in love and happier than ever before. But then Leo tragically dies, and Lottie is left floundering. As she struggles to stop her life falling apart, Lottie learns more about the man she thought she knew, and starts to question whether Leo really was as perfect as he seemed…The brand-new heart-breaking novel of love, loss and learning to live again, from the acclaimed author of MARRIED AT FIRST SWIPE. Perfect for fans of Paige Toon, Holly Miller and Rosie Walsh. Praise for Claire Frost‘Claire’s books are always life-affirming and a treat to read’ PHAEDRA PATRICK'A wonderful read!' SOPHIE COUSENS‘Refreshing, brilliantly-written and highly addictive!’ HELLY ACTON'If you’re looking for a story to make you shed a few tears and cheer, this is the one!' MIRANDA DICKINSON'The perfect tonic for these gloomy times. Totally relatable but at the same time, total escapism, and it was so easy to race through the pages' LIA LOUIS'Claire Frost's writing is like your warmest gal pal gossiping with you over a gin' LAURA JANE WILLIAMS‘A heart-warming page-turner. Impossible to put down!’ HOLLY MARTIN'I couldn’t put it down. What a wonderful, wise book!' ALEX BROWN'A fabulously heart-warming novel about love, friendships, and being honest with yourself about what you want from life' ANNA BELL

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What happens when what you wish for is only half the story...?Three strangers and a funeral, that’s all it takes for these women’s lives and wishes to intersect. Death has a funny way of showing you what you really want out of life… or so they say, anyway. Jo is flirty and a little after thirty, but what she really wants is to get her business back on track and conquer her fear of heights. That’s what she’ll say when asked, anyway. She has things to prove and finding love can always wait… Sarah has the best of both worlds, baby in one hand and job in the other. All she wants is to get that promotion, then all those missed bath times will be worth it. So she says, anyway. She can’t stop to think about it too long or she might drop something… All Carrie wants is to shift the excess pounds and look good for summer. Wearing a bikini is all she has ever desired. So she has always said, anyway. But it’s not the only weight she’s carrying, dark secrets from her past are threatening to surface… So the three unlikely new friends set themselves a deadline to get their lives in order; juggling blokes, babies and bikini bottoms along the way. There’s nothing to stop them from achieving their dreams – except those little white lies we all tell… A feel-good romantic comedy that's guaranteed to make you smile - perfect for fans of Carole Matthews, Trisha Ashley and Katie Fforde.Your favourite authors have loved reading bestselling Cathy Bramley:‘Delightfully warm with plenty of twists and turns’ Trisha Ashley‘Engaging characters and a sweeping romance. This is delightful!’ Katie Fforde‘A witty, laugh-out-loud romantic comedy’ Miranda Dickinson‘The perfect romantic tale, to warm your heart and make you smile.’ Ali McNamara

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Introducing a beautifully-designed collection of sixteen short stories from some of the best English writers over two hundred years of our history.The Penguin Book of English Short Stories celebrates the shorter format through some of the most widely known writers of all time. Though many are known for their novels, they provide a mesmerizing, multi-faceted portrait of a country and its people. Some stories are classics, such as James Joyce's The Dead; others - like Mr Loveday's Little Outing by Evelyn Waugh - are relatively unknown and a joy to discover.Covering a wide range of genres and writers, each of these concise, evocative, subtle and satisfying stories is a little jewel, providing a small window into another world.Featuring short stories from classical English authors including Charles Dickens, Katherine Mansfield, H.G. Wells, Evelyn Waugh, Virginia Woolf and many more.

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Few cities have been so celebrated in print as Bath - from Smollett to Jane Austen, from Dickens to Fanny Burney, and from Sheridan to Georgette Heyer. Many other famous writers have passed through as well - Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in a house in the Abbey Church Yard, Coleridge met his wife in the city, and in the twentieth century John Betjeman championed its architectural heritage. Even Shakespeare - or so it is believed - turned up to take a dip in the hot springs. These eleven walks look at Bath through their eyes, creating a vivid social history of the city over the last 300 years and bringing the past alive with unparalleled immediacy. Fully illustrated, and including in-depth accounts of the writers and works featured, they can either be followed on foot or - with the aid of historic maps of the city - read as a series of essays.

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The Author's Effects: On the Writer's House Museum is the first book to describe how the writer's house museum came into being as a widespread cultural phenomenon across Britain, Europe, and North America. Exploring the ways that authorship has been mythologised through the conventions of the writer's house museum, The Author's Effects anatomises the how and why of the emergence, establishment, and endurance of popular notions of authorship in relation to creativity. It traces how and why the writer's bodily remains, possessions, and spaces came to be treasured in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as a prelude to the appearance of formal writer's house museums. It ransacks more than 100 museums and archives to tell the stories of celebrated and paradigmatic relics—Burns' skull, Keats' hair, Petrarch's cat, Poe's raven, Brontë's bonnet, Dickinson's dress, Shakespeare's chair, Austen's desk, Woolf's spectacles, Hawthorne's window, Freud's mirror, Johnson's coffee-pot and Bulgakov's stove, amongst many others. It investigates houses within which nineteenth-century writers mythologised themselves and their work—Thoreau's cabin and Dumas' tower, Scott's Abbotsford and Irving's Sunnyside. And it tracks literary tourists of the past to such long-celebrated literary homes as Petrarch's Arquà, Rousseau's Ile St Pierre, and Shakespeare's Stratford to find out what they thought and felt and did, discovering deep continuities with the redevelopment of Shakespeare's New Place for 2016.

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Two little dicky birds, sitting on the wall, Hello, Peter, hello . . . wait, where did Paul go?! Help Peter rescue Paul in this interactive story! Tickle dragon''s nose to save Paul from being gobbled up, cast a spell to get him out of the witch's house, and find a way to help him escape a dark, scary cave all while a hapless Paul is completely oblivious to the danger he's in! Can you help Peter save Paul and get him back to their wall safely?

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To which institutions or social practices should we grant authority? When should we instead assert our own sense of what is right or good or necessary? In this text, the author shows how texts by some of the important thinkers and writers - including Plato, Shakespeare, Dickinson, Mandela and Lincoln - answer these questions in the way they wrestle with the claims of the world and self in particular historical and cultural contexts. As they define the institutions or practices for which they claim (or resist) authority, they create authorities of their own, in the modes of thought and expression they employ. They imagine their world anew and transform the languages that give it meaning. In so doing, White maintains, these works teach us about how to read and judge claims of authority made by others upon us; how to decide to which institutions and practices we should grant authority; and how to create authorities of our own through our thoughts and arguments.

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For almost three thousand years, Egypt and Mesopotamia were each ruled by the single sacred office of kingship. Though geographically near, these ancient civilizations were culturally distinct, and scholars have historically contrasted their respective conceptualizations of the ultimate authority, imagining Egyptian kings as invested with cosmic power and Mesopotamian kings as primarily political leaders. In fact, both kingdoms depended on religious ideals and political resources to legitimate and exercise their authority. Cross-cultural comparison reveals the sophisticated and varied strategies that ancient kings used to unify and govern their growing kingdoms. Experiencing Power, Generating Authority draws on rich material records left behind by both kingdoms, from royal monuments and icons to the written deeds and commissions of kings. Thirteen essays provocatively juxtapose the relationships Egyptian and Mesopotamian kings had with their gods and religious mediators, as well as their subjects and court officials. They also explore the ideological significance of landscape in each kingdom, since the natural and built environment influenced the economy, security, and cosmology of these lands. The interplay of religion, politics, and territory is dramatized by the everyday details of economy, trade, and governance, as well as the social crises of war or the death of a king. Reexamining established notions of cosmic and political rule, Experiencing Power, Generating Authority challenges and deepens scholarly approaches to rulership in the ancient world. Contributors: Mehmet-Ali Ataç, Miroslav Bárta, Dominique Charpin, D. Bruce Dickson, Eckart Frahm, Alan B. Lloyd, Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia, Ludwig D. Morenz, Ellen Morris, Beate Pongratz-Leisten, Michael Roaf, Walther Sallaberger, JoAnn Scurlock. PMIRC, volume 6

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Dickiran is a collection of tender drawings of dick pics from Iranian cyberspace.

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This attractive poster features a concise introduction to Charles Dickens, alongside a timeline putting the author's life events in their national and political context. Photographs and illustrations include the original title page of 'Nicholas Nickleby' and portraits of significant figures in Dickens' life, whilst detailed information is organised into the topics: early life; becoming a writer; realism in writing; Dickens and the theatre; public readings; chronology of novels; social conditions; private life; Dickens in America; odd names of some Dickens characters; travels abroad; Dickens' London. Trivia about the author will help to ignite children's curiosity.

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Adapted from Dickens' works of fiction, this story imagines his life at a young age before he became a celebrated author.

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Introduced by bestselling author Nick Hornby, this hilarious anthology of the funniest bits' from Dickens' novels is illustrated throughout with humorous line drawings from early editions.

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A collection of original essays and innovative reading strategies—provides examples of reading Dickens in creative and challenging ways Reading Dickens Differently features contributions from many of the field’s leading scholars, offering creative ways of reading Dickens and enriching understanding of the most celebrated author of his time. A diverse range of innovative reading strategies—archival, historical, textual, and digital—representing new and exciting approaches to contemporary literary and cultural studies. This groundbreaking volume brings together literature, history, politics, painting, illustration, social media, video games, and other topics to reveal new opportunities to engage with the author's life and work. This unique book includes a re-evaluation of Dickens’ death and burial, new research data drawn from legal records and newspapers, assessments of well-known paintings and lesser-known illustrations, experimental readings of Dickens’ texts in digital form, and more. Much of the evidence presented has never been seen before, such as Dickens' funeral fee account from Westminster Abbey, Dickens' death certificate, and a telegram from Dickens' son asking for urgent assistance for his dying father. Revising and refreshing the critical strategies of traditional Dickens studies, this important volume: Features new research data on aspects of Dickens's life Discusses a range of innovative reading strategies (including physiological novel theory) for clarifying aspects of Dickens' work Examines the presence of Dickens in popular media and technology, such as Assassin’s Creed video game and A Christmas Carol iPad app Features rare illustrations, including documents and images relating to Dickens's death and funeral Edited by world authorities on Dickens and his manuscripts Authoritative, yet accessible, Reading Dickens Differently is a must-have book for Dickens specialists, instructors and students in Victorian fiction and Dickens courses, as well as general readers lookingfor innovative reading strategies of the author's work.

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This work argues that Shakespeare can be appropriated by both dominant and marginal groups to lend cultural currency to their own works. While his cultural status may be used to subvert traditional ideas of politics and letters in Eliot and Swinburne, it may also be used to promote more conservative policies and literary interpretations in other writers such as Browning and Dickens.

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A beautifully illustrated collection of five classic Charles Dickens' stories, retold for younger readers. Includes 'Oliver Twist', 'Bleak House', 'Great Expectations', 'A Tale of Two Cities' and 'David Copperfield' as well as a short biography of the great author himself. With internet links to find out more about the life and times of Charles Dickens.

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'The greatest writer of his time.' (George Orwell)The author of 20 much-loved novels and novellas, Charles Dickens combined humour and pathos to explore Victorian society in all its shades. Widely praised for his rich narratives and larger-than-life characters, he was not only a celebrity author but also an admired social reformer. Moving from the refined drawing rooms of the upper classes to the horrors of the workhouse or the filthy back streets of London, Dickens' writings shone a light on the harsh inequalities of the times.The Little Book of Charles Dickens showcases wonderful quotes from the author's writings, alongside fascinating facts about his life and achievements. By turns witty, comic, insightful and wise, this delightful volume is a fitting tribute to a literary giant.SAMPLE QUOTE: 'It is said that the children of the very poor are not brought up, but dragged up.' Bleak HouseSAMPLE FACT: When Dickens was 12 years old, his father was sent to a debtor's prison. Forced to become the family's main breadwinner, the young Dickens worked at Warren's Blacking Factory, where he was paid a pittance for pasting labels onto bottles of shoe polish.

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The Wicked Wit Of Charles Dickens explores and reveals aspects of the author's personal and professional life, whilst celebrating his flair for witty and satirical observations about society and human nature. Contains lengthy extracts from scenes of great amusement in his novels, as well as pithy remarks uttered by his unique characters.

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Charles Dickens is the acclaimed definitive biography by bestselling author Claire Tomalin Charles Dickens was a phenomenon: a demonicly hardworking journalist, the father of ten children, a tireless walker and traveller, a supporter of liberal social causes, but most of all a great novelist - the creator of characters who live immortally in the English imagination: the Artful Dodger, Mr Pickwick, Pip, David Copperfield, Little Nell, Lady Dedlock, and many more.At the age of twelve he was sent to work in a blacking factory by his affectionate but feckless parents. From these unpromising beginnings, he rose to scale all the social and literary heights, entirely through his own efforts. When he died, the world mourned, and he was buried - against his wishes - in Westminster Abbey.Yet the brilliance concealed a divided character: a republican, he disliked America; sentimental about the family in his writings, he took up passionately with a young actress; usually generous, he cut off his impecunious children. From the award-winning author of Samuel Pepys, Charles Dickens: A Life paints an unforgettable portrait of Dickens, capturing brilliantly the complex character of this great genius. If you loved Great Expectations, Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol, this book is invaluable reading.'By far the most humane and imaginatively sympathetic account yet for the general reader' Amanda Craig, New Statesman

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The same inimitable voice and dazzling insights that make Emily Dickinson's poems immortal can be found in the whimsical, humorous, and often deeply moving letters she wrote to her family and friends throughout her life. The selection of letters presented here provides a fuller picture of the eccentric recluse of legend, showing how immersed in life she was: we see her tending her garden; baking bread; marking the marriages, births, and deaths of those she loved; reaching out for intellectual companionship; and confessing her personal joys and sorrows. These letters, invaluable for the light they shed on their author, are, as well, a pure pleasure to read.

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From childhood, Charles Dickens was fascinated by tales from other countries and other cultures and he longed to see the world. In Dickens and Travel, Lucinda Hawksley looks at the journeys made by her great great great grandfather. Dickens is usually perceived as a London author, yet in the 1840s, he whisked his family away to live in Italy for year, and some years later took up residence in Switzerland and then Paris. He travelled widely in Europe, long before the arrival of high-speed rail, toured America (twice) and Canada and, before his untimely death, was planning a tour of Australia. Dickens and Travel enters into the world of the Victorian traveller and looks at how Dickens's journeys affected his writing.

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Brilliant - funny, wise and completely addictive - a work of angry, outrageous and hilarious genius VICTORIA HISLOPFull of energy and blistering rationality LISA McINERNEYA must-read . . . While waiting for society to evolve, Virginie Despentes stays the same VogueDear Dickhead,I read the piece you posted on Insta. You''re like a pigeon shitting on my shoulder as you flap past. It''s shitty and unpleasant. Congratulations: you''ve had your fifteen minutes of fame! You want proof? Here I am writing to you.Rebecca Latté is a famous actress in her fifties, perhaps past the peak of her career.Oscar Jayack is a middle-aged, moderately successful author who, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, has been accused of sexual harassment by his former publicist-turned-feminist blogger Zoé Katana.When Oscar insults Rebecca''s appearance on Instagram, she sends a scorching reply and the pair fall i

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Articles, tributes and reminiscences of composer, pianist and author Peter Dickinson are here brought together for the first time. Peter Dickinson made an enduring contribution to British musical life, and his music has been regularly performed and recorded by leading musicians. His writings, brought together here for the first time, are equally noteworthy. Covering well over half a century, the subjects are fascinatingly varied. Apart from musical interests ranging from Charles Ives to John Cage, they touch on literature; and Dickinson's meetings with W.H. Auden and Philip Larkin are an intriguing insight that led to his Auden songs and the chamber work Larkin's Jazz. American themes are prominent in this collection. There are unique reviews of concert life in New York from 1959 to 1961; an account of the teaching programme at the Juilliard School of Music at that time; three studies of Ives; and features containing original material on Copland, Thomson and Cage, all of whom Dickinson knew. Features on Erik Satie include the imaginary discussion marking his centenary in 1966. Dickinson also writes about his own music, providing an insight into what it was like being a British composer in the later twentieth century. Peter Dickinson was born in Lancashire in 1934 and lived in Suffolk until his passing. His 80th birthday was marked by a whole variety of tributes, including concerts, articles, broadcasts and various interviews - some included in this book. PETER DICKINSON was a British composer and pianist as well as author and editor of Boydell/URP books on Berkeley, Copland, Cage, Barber and Berners. As a pianist, Dickinson had a twenty-five-year, international partnership with his sister, the mezzo Meriel Dickinson, for whom he wrote song cycles to poems of E. E. Cummings, Gregory Corso and Stevie Smith. He was a regular contributor to BBC Radio 3 and was widely read as a critic on the Gramophone. He was an Emeritus Professor of the Universities of Keele and London and was chair of the Bernarr Rainbow Trust, for which he edited several books on music education.

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A page-turning account of the scandal that almost ruined Dickens and how the story disappeared from history Charles Dickens was regarded as the great proponent of hearth and home in Victorian Britain, but in 1858 this image was nearly shattered. With the breakup of his marriage that year, rumors of a scandalous relationship he may have conducted with the young actress Ellen "Nelly" Ternan flourished. For the remaining twelve years of his life, Dickens managed to contain the gossip. After his death, surviving family members did the same. But when the author's last living son died in 1934, there was no one to discourage rampant speculation. Dramatic revelations came from every corner—over Nelly's role as Dickens's mistress, their clandestine meetings, and even about his possibly fathering an illegitimate child by her.This book presents the most complete account of the scandal and ensuing cover-up ever published. Drawing on the author's letters and other archival sources not previously available, Dickens scholar Michael Slater investigates what Dickens did or may have done, then traces the way the scandal was elaborated over succeeding generations. Slater shows how various writers concocted outlandish yet plausible theories while newspapers and book publishers vied for sensational revelations. With its tale of intrigue and a cast of well-known figures from Thackeray and Shaw to Orwell and Edmund Wilson, this engaging book will delight not only Dickens fans but also readers who appreciate tales of mystery, cover-up, and clever detection.

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By the Booker-winning author of Schindler's Ark, a vibrant novel about Charles Dickens' son and his little-known adventures in the Australian Outback.In 1868, Charles Dickens dispatches his youngest child, sixteen-year-old Edward, to Australia. Posted to a remote sheep station in New South Wales, Edward discovers that his father's fame has reached even there, as has the gossip about his father's scandalous liaison with an actress. Amid colonists, ex-convicts, local tribespeople and a handful of eligible young women, Edward strives to be his own man - and keep secret the fact that he's read none of his father's novels.Conjuring up a life of sheep-droving, horse-racing and cricket tournaments in a community riven with tensions and prejudice, the story of Edward's adventures also affords an intimate portrait of Dickens' himself. This vivacious novel is classic Keneally: historical figures and events re-imagined with verve, humour and compassion.

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Charles Dickens is a much-loved author for his vast and important contributions to English literature. This collection brings together his supernatural short stories, some of which were included in his longer works, and others that originally featured in magazines, including ‘The Bagman’s Story’, ‘The Ghost in the Bride’s Chamber’ and ‘To Be Read at Dusk’, among others. They are all fantastically gripping stories from one of the greatest writers of all-time. Essential collaborations with his acolytes Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell are also included.

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This paperback will feature three Christmas-themed stories by the author, led by "The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton," a tale acknowledged as a precursor to Dickens's beloved classic A Christmas Carol. Other featured stories include "What Christmas Is as We Grow Older" and "A Christmas Dinner."

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A magnificent new biography of the man who gave us David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and Ebenezer Scrooge This long-awaited biography, twenty years after the last major account, uncovers Dickens the man through the profession in which he excelled. Drawing on a lifetime’s study of this prodigiously brilliant figure, Michael Slater explores the personal and emotional life, the high-profile public activities, the relentless travel, the charitable works, the amateur theatricals and the astonishing productivity. But the core focus is Dickens’ career as a writer and professional author, covering not only his big novels but also his phenomenal output of other writing--letters, journalism, shorter fiction, plays, verses, essays, writings for children, travel books, speeches, and scripts for his public readings, and the relationships among them.Slater’s account, rooted in deep research but written with affection, clarity, and economy, illuminates the context of each of the great novels while locating the life of the author within the imagination that created them. It highlights Dickens’ boundless energy, his passion for order and fascination with disorder, his organizational genius, his deep concern for the poor and outrage at indifference towards them, his susceptibility towards young women, his love of Christmas and fairy tales, and his hatred of tyranny.Richly and precisely illustrated with many rare images, this masterly work on the complete Dickens, man and writer, becomes the indispensable guide and companion to one of the greatest novelists in the language.

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Essays exploring the ways in which Dickens' vision is both so much of its time, and yet has so much resonance for today. The scale of the 2012 bicentenary celebrations of Dickens's birth is testimony to his status as one of the most globally popular literary authors the world has ever seen. Yet Dickens has also become associated in the public imagination with a particular version of the Victorian past and with respectability. His continued cultural prominence and the "brand recognition" achieved by his image and images suggest that his vision reaches out beyond the Victorianperiod. Yet what is the relationship between Dickens and the modern world? Do his works offer a consoling version of the past or are they attuned to that state of uncertainty and instability we associate with the nebulous but resonant concept of modernity? This volume positions Dickens as both a literary and a cultural icon with a complex relationship to the cultural landscape in his own period and since. It seeks to demonstrate that oppositions which have pervaded approaches to Dickens - Victorian vs modern, artist vs entertainer, culture vs commerce - are false, by exploring the diversity and multiplicity of Dickens's textual and extra-textual lives. A specially commissioned Afterword by Florian Schweizer, Director of the Dickens 2012 celebrations, offers a fascinating insight into the shaping of this year-long public programme of commemoration of Dickens. Like the volume as a whole, it asks us toconsider the nature of our connection with "this quintessentially Victorian writer" and what it is about Dickens that still appeals to people around the world. Professor Juliet John holds the Hildred Carlile Chair of English Literature, Royal Holloway, University of London. Contributors: Jay Clayton, Holly Furneaux, John Drew, Michaela Mahlberg, Juliet John, Michael Hollington, Joss Marsh, Carrie Sickmann, Kim Edwardes Keates, DominicRainsford, Florian Schweizer

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PEN/ Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Longlist O, The Oprah Magazine "Best Books of Summer" selection "Magnetic nonfiction." --O, The Oprah Magazine "Remarkable insight ...[a] unique meditation/investigation...Jerome Charyn the unpredictable, elusive, and enigmatic is a natural match for Emily Dickinson, the quintessence of these." --Joyce Carol Oates, author of Wild Nights! and The Lost Landscape We think we know Emily Dickinson: the Belle of Amherst, virginal, reclusive, and possibly mad. But in A Loaded Gun, Jerome Charyn introduces us to a different Emily Dickinson: the fierce, brilliant, and sexually charged poet who wrote: My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun-- ...Though I than He-- may longer live He longer must--than I-- For I have but the power to kill, Without--the power to die-- Through interviews with contemporary scholars, close readings of Dickinson's correspondence and handwritten manuscripts, and a suggestive, newly discovered photograph that is purported to show Dickinson with her lover, Charyn's literary sleuthing reveals the great poet in ways that have only been hinted at previously: as a woman who was deeply philosophical, intensely engaged with the world, attracted to members of both sexes, and able to write poetry that disturbs and delights us today. Jerome Charyn is the author of, most recently, Bitter Bronx: Thirteen Stories, I Am Abraham: A Novel of Lincoln and the Civil War, and The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson: A Novel. He lives in New York.

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Think you already know the story of Charles Dickens' life? Think again.Almost everything you're familiar with was first mentioned in an authorised biography written by Dickens' close friend John Forster 150 years ago. It's the version of events that Dickens himself chose to make public, and newly accessible archives reveal that it's crammed with gaps, inconsistencies, and outright lies. There's the sister whose existence Dickens kept secret and the Jewish relations whose faith he strove to conceal. There's plagiarism, fraud, and suicide.And that's only for starters. Helena Kelly, author of the acclaimed Jane Austen, the Secret Radical, retells Dickens' story from his childhood to his deathbed, uncovers the truths he tried to keep hidden, and offers a fresh - and deeply troubling - perspective on the man who remains one of Britain's best-known novelists.You won't be able to look at him - or his work - in the same way again.

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William B. Thesing, James Dickey’s colleague at the University of South Carolina for twenty years, has a unique and complex perspective on the life and writing of this great twentieth-century American author. Dickey offers readers, students, and teachers a variety of energized and imaginative texts, and Thesing provides original and perceptive readings of his life and his novels as well as his most popular poems about animals in nature, man in nature, social and sexual relationships, women, and civilian and wartime death. This is the only introductory teaching/study guide available on Dickey’s poems and novels. Chapters are conveniently organized around essential thematic categories. The author employs various modern critical approaches – from feminist criticism to deconstruction – to the poems and novels. The book will be useful in college or high school courses on Southern literature, American poetry, and twentieth-century literature.

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Dickens was a landmark biography when first published in 1990. This specially edited shorter edition takes the reader into the life of one of the world's greatest writers.Here, Ackroyd attempts to peel away the mask of a man whose life was outwardly a picture of Victorian rectitude, but whose love life was as complicated (and unconventional) as any modern writer's. Dickens had everything - fame, success and riches - but he died harbouring a deep sadness he had experienced all his life. He was a man of mercurial character, had enormous vitality and humour, but he also had a sense of loss and longing that would constantly appear in his work. Like many eminent Victorians, he led a double life: although he insisted that nothing in the newspapers he edited should upset his middle-class readers, he regularly indulged in dubious night-time escapades with fellow author Wilkie Collins, and, for the last 13 years of his life, kept a secret mistress.

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Best friends Molly Malone and Bram Stoker are headed to London to collect his brother Thornley from boarding school. When they arrive, they discover that Charles Dickens has been kidnapped. Our heroes resolve to find the great author. Can Molly and Bram solve the riddle of the disappearing Dickens?

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Following Charles Dickens’s death, his friend and biographer, John Forster, discovers a ‘lost’ manuscript that provides a radically different view of the year the young author spent working in a blacking factory. But is the account fact or fiction? In the 1820s the Dickens family arrive to start a new life in London . Charles (‘Charley’) is just eleven and looking to continue his education. However, instead of being sent to school – and as his family fall deeply into debt – he is put to work in a boot-blacking factory at Hungerford Stairs. With his father soon cast into the Marshalsea debtors prison, Charley’s eagerness to earn an extra shilling sees him drawn into a criminal network led by the dark figure of Mr Magnus. The combination of demeaning factory work with this new and dangerous criminal activity places a huge burden on Charley, at a time when his mother and siblings are increasingly dependent on him. Life becomes even more complicated when Charley is approached by the mysterious Mr Hesketh. How can the future novelist balance the demands of family, paid work and the London underworld amidst a situation that moves swiftly from casual abuse to violence, and ultimately the hangman’s noose?

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Superb, highly accessible biography of one of the giants of English literature by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A THOUSAND ACRES'Engaging and stimulating' Simon Callow'Jane Smiley, in her admirable contribution to Weidenfeld's series of short biographies, deals briskly with Dickens's career and works, and treats with sympathy and sense his relations with the women in his life' LITERARY REVIEWFrom a bitter and poverty-stricken childhood to a career as the most acclaimed and best loved writer in the English-speaking world, Charles Dickens had a life as full of incident as any of those he created in his novels of life in Victorian England. The enormous quantity of work, his public readings and his difficult relationships has made him a figure of enduring fascination. In this biography Jane Smiley reveals Charles Dickens as his contemporaries would have done, getting to know him more intimately than ever before. At the same time Smiley offers interpretations of almost all of Dickens' major works, showing how 'his novels shaped his life as much as his life shaped his novels'.

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Charles Dickens was born into fairly comfortable circumstances in Portsmouth in 1812, but his father incurred considerable debt and was eventually imprisoned. At the age of 12, Dickens had to work in a shoe blacking factory and was only able to continue his education at 15. In 1833, he began a career in journalism and his first novel, The Pickwick Papers (1836-37), established him as an author. By the time of his death in 1870, he was the world's most popular writer.

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Even within the context of Charles Dickens's history as a publishing innovator, Our Mutual Friend is notable for what it reveals about Dickens as an author and about Victorian publishing. Marking Dickens's return to the monthly number format after nearly a decade of writing fiction designed for weekly publication in All the Year Round, Our Mutual Friend emerged against the backdrop of his failing health, troubled relationship with Ellen Ternan, and declining reputation among contemporary critics. In his subtly argued publishing history, Sean Grass shows how these difficulties combined to make Our Mutual Friend an extraordinarily odd novel, no less in its contents and unusually heavy revisions than in its marketing by Chapman and Hall, its transformation from a serial into British and U.S. book editions, its contemporary reception by readers and reviewers, and its delightfully uneven reputation among critics in the 150 years since Dickens’s death. Enhanced by four appendices that offer contemporary accounts of the Staplehurst railway accident, information on archival materials, transcripts of all of the contemporary reviews, and a select bibliography of editions, Grass’s book shows why this last of Dickens’s finished novels continues to intrigue its readers and critics.

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This book reappraises Dickens's Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi and his imaginative engagement with its principal protagonist.

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Emily Dickinson's fascicles, the forty booklets comprising more than 800 of her poems that she gathered and bound together with string, had long been cast into disarray until R. W. Franklin restored them to their original state, then made them available to readers in his 1981 Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson. Many Dickinson readers believe their ordering to be random, while others have proposed that one or more of the fascicles appear to center upon some organizing principle.In this important critical study, Dorothy Huff Oberhaus demonstrates for the first time the structural principles underlying Emily Dickinson's assembling of the fascicles. Oberhaus argues that Dickinson's fortieth fascicle is a three-part meditation and the triumphant conclusion of a long lyric cycle, the account of a spiritual and poetic pilgrimage that begins with the first fascicle's first poem. The author in turn finds that the other thirty-eight fascicles are meditative gatherings of interwoven poems centering upon common themes.Discovering the structural principles underlying Dickinson's arrangement of the fascicles presents a very different poet from the one portrayed by previous critics. This careful reading of the fascicles reveals that Dickinson was capable of arranging a long, sustained major work with the most subtle and complex organization. Oberhaus also finds Dickinson to be a Christian poet for whom the Bible was not merely a source of imagery, as has long been thought; rather, the Bible is essential to Dickinson's structure and meaning and therefore an essential source for understanding her poems.Discovering the structural principles underlying Dickinson’s arrangement of the fascicles presents a very different poet from the one portrayed by previous critics. This careful reading of the fascicles reveals that Dickinson was capable of arranging a long, sustained major work with the most subtle and complex organization. Oberhaus also finds Dickinson to be a Christian poet for whom the Bible was not merely a source of imagery, as has long been thought; rather, the Bible is essential to Dickinson’s structure and meaning and therefore an essential source for understanding her poems.

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By the author of Schindler's Ark and master storyteller, Thomas Keneally, a vibrant novel about Charles Dickens' son and his adventures in the Australian Outback.In 1868, Charles Dickens dispatches his youngest child to Australia. Like his brother Alfred before him, sixteen-year-old Edward is expected to learn to apply himself in what his father considers to be the new land of opportunity. Posted to a remote sheep station in New South Wales, Edward discovers that Charles Dickens' fame has reached even there, as has the gossip about his father's scandalous liaison with an actress. Amid colonists, ex-convicts, local tribespeople and a handful of eligible young women, Edward strives to be his own man - and keep secret the fact that he's read none of his father's novels.Conjuring up a life of sheep-droving, horse-racing and cricket tournaments in a community riven with tensions and prejudice, the story of Edward's adventures also affords an intimate portrait of Dickens' himself. This vivacious novel is classic Keneally: historical figures and events re-imagined with verve, humour and compassion.

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This book reappraises Dickens's Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi and his imaginative engagement with its principal protagonist.

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Written in the form of a back-and-forth dialogue between the two authors, this book is about the relationship between feeling and thinking in Dickens''s novels. It presents Dickens as a psychological thinker, whose generative thought may be conscious, unconscious, half-conscious, or in transit between one state and another. This Dickens is always in live process, improvizing from one monthly number to the next, subtly revizing as he goes, shifting moods, tenses, and tones from one paragraph or sentence to the next, as what he writes sparks off what he suddenly, newly, thinks. The chapters approach this inquiry through close readings of chosen passages, including studies of telling revisions in Dickens''s manuscripts that reveal the power of his deepened second thoughts. They also draw on selected moments from his personal letters and prefaces when these more casual writings prove to be sketches or rehearsals for thoughts and feelings that achieve new life when they are transformed into

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Explore the essence of life, love, nature, and time in exquisite verse with this elegantly designed edition of Emily Dickinson’s finest poems. Born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a prominent New England family and educated at Amherst Academy and Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary, Emily Elizabeth Dickinson lived most of her life in seclusion, devoted to writing. She scarcely left home, nor did she have many visitors. Only ten of her poems were published in her lifetime, submitted without her permission by friends. It was only after her death in 1886 that the scope of her work as a poet came to light—over 1,700 poems were discovered in a dresser drawer by her sister, Lavinia. Emily Dickinson’s poems reflect her loneliness, as well as her love of nature, the influence of the Metaphysical poets of seventeenth century England, and her strong Puritan religious beliefs. Yet, it is her use of language, form, and the deceptive simplicity of her verse that categorize her as an important force in nineteenth century American letters and, along with Walt Whitman, a founder of a distinctly American voice in modern poetry. PRELUDE THIS is my letter to the world, That never wrote to me,— That simple news that Nature told, With tender majesty. Her message is committed To hands I cannot see; For love of her, sweet countrymen, Judge tenderly of me! The Timeless Classics series from Rock Point brings together the works of classic authors from around the world. Complete and unabridged, these elegantly designed gift editions feature luxe, patterned endpapers, ribbon markers, and foil and deboss details on vibrantly colored cases. Celebrate these beloved works of literature as true standouts in your personal library collection.

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Charles Dickens is credited with creating some of the world's best-known fictional characters, and is widely regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian age. Even before reading the works of Dickens many people have met him already in some form or another. His characters have such vitality that they have leapt from his pages to enjoy flourishing lives of their own: The Artful Dodger, Miss Havisham, Scrooge, Fagin, Mr Micawber, and many many more. His portrait has been in our pockets, on our ten-pound notes; he is a national icon, indeed himself a generator of what Englishness signifies. In this Very Short Introduction Jenny Hartley explores the key themes running through Dickens's corpus of works, and considers how they reflect his attitudes towards the harsh realities of nineteenth century society and its institutions, such as the workhouses and prisons. Running alonside this is Dickens's relish of the carnivalesque; if there is a prison in almost every novel, there is also a theatre. She considers Dickens's multiple lives and careers: as magazine editor for two thirds of his working life, as travel writer and journalist, and his work on behalf of social causes including ragged schools and fallen women. She also shows how his public readings enthralled the readers he wanted to reach but also helped to kill him. Finally, Hartley considers what we mean when we use the term 'Dickensian' today, and how Dickens's enduring legacy marks him out as as a novelist different in kind from others. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable. · This book was previously published in hardback as Charles Dickens: An Introduction

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