The Cambridge Introduction to Charles Dickens

by Jon Mee

Overview

Charles Dickens became immensely popular early on in his career as a novelist, and his appeal continues to grow with new editions prompted by recent television and film adaptations, as well as large numbers of students studying the Victorian novel. This lively and accessible introduction to Dickens focuses on the extraordinary diversity of his writing. Jon Mee discusses Dickens's novels, journalism and public performances, the historical contexts and his influence on other writers. In the process, five major themes emerge: Dickens the entertainer; Dickens and language; Dickens and London; Dickens, gender, and domesticity; and the question of adaptation, including Dickens's adaptations of his own work. These interrelated concerns allow readers to start making their own new connections between his famous and less widely read works and to appreciate fully the sheer imaginative richness of his writing, which particularly evokes the dizzying expansion of nineteenth-century London.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521676342
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	09/02/2010
Series:	Cambridge Introductions to Literature
Pages:	134
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 8.98(h) x 0.28(d)

About the Author

Jon Mee was educated at Newcastle University and the University of Cambridge. After a Junior Research Fellowship at Jesus College, Oxford, he took up his first permanent position at the Australian National University. He returned to the University of Oxford to take up the Margaret Candfield Fellowship in English at University College and a post in the Oxford English Faculty. He moved to the University of Warwick in 2007 and then took his current position as Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of York in October 2013.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations viii

Preface ix

Chronology xii

List of abbreviations xv

1 Dickens the entertainer: 'People must be amuthed' 1

2 Dickens and language: 'What I meantersay' 20

3 Dickens and the city: 'Animate London ... inanimate London' 43

4 Dickens, gender, and domesticity: 'Be it ever ... so ghastly ... there's no place like it' 64

5 Adapting Dickens: 'He do the police in different voices' 84

Afterword: Dickens's world 99

Notes 101

Further reading 107

Index 112