Chesterton's two-part biography of Charles Dickens examines the life and works of 19th century British literary figure Charles Dickens. Chesterton's reinterpretation of Dickens' life and work proved important to the modern perception of Dickens as a literary giant, and the work has received widespread praise. Includes an active table of contents for easy navigation.

Excerpt: "...he is hardly even a caricaturist; that he is something very like a realist. Those comic monstrosities which the critics found incredible will be found to be the immense majority of the citizens of this country. We shall find that Sweedlepipe cuts our hair and Pumblechook sells our cereals; that Sam Weller blacks our boots and Tony Weller drives our omnibus. For the exaggerated notion of the exaggerations of Dickens (as was admirably pointed...

Jack and Annie travel back to Victorian London when Merlin asks them to use their magic to inspire Charles Dickens to write "A Christmas Carol."

A novel based on the true story of the struggle Charles Dickens faced during the winter of 1843 while writing his now-classic holiday tale, A Christmas Carol 1843, London. Though the approaching Christmas looks bleak at the home of the Dickens family, Charles and his pregnant wife Catherine try to maintain a good cheer for their four young children. Debts are mounting, food is scarce, and Charles' books, according to his miserly publisher, are no...

In his most enthralling novel yet, the critically acclaimed author Matthew Pearl reopens one of literary history’s greatest mysteries. The Last Dickens is a tale filled with the dazzling twists and turns, the unerring period details, and the meticulous research that thrilled readers of the bestsellers The Dante Club and The Poe Shadow.
Boston, 1870. When news of Charles Dickens’s untimely death reaches the office...

"Charles Dickens was a superb public performer, a great orator and one of the most famous of the Eminent Victorians. Slight of build, with a frenzied, hyper-energetic personality, Dickens looked much older than his fifty-eight years when he died--an occasion marked by a crowded funeral at Westminster Abbey, despite his waking wishes for a small affair. Experiencing the worst and best of life during the Victorian Age, Dickens was not merely the conduit...

As a child, Charles Dickens worked in a shoe polish factory where his gritty surroundings inspired some of the most memorable characters and settings in literary history. Known for his masterful storytelling in books like Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, and A Christmas Carol, Dickens toured the globe as one of the most famous people of his era. Widely considered the greatest writer of the Victorian age, Dickens’s...

The sensational bestselling story of Little Nell, the beautiful child thrown into a shadowy, terrifying world, seems to belong less to the history of the Victorian novel than to folklore, fairy tale, or myth. The sorrows of Nell and her grandfather are offset by Dickens's creation of a dazzling contemporary world inhabited by some of his most brilliantly drawn characters-the eloquent ne'er-do-well Dick Swiveller; the hungry maid known as the "Marchioness";...

"From the critically acclaimed author of The Invention of Murder, an extraordinary, revelatory portrait of everyday life on the streets of Dickens' London.The nineteenth century was a time of unprecedented change, and nowhere was this more apparent than London. In only a few decades, the capital grew from a compact Regency town into a sprawling metropolis of 6.5 million inhabitants, the largest city the world had ever seen. Technology--railways, street-lighting,...

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) created some of England's most enduring works of fiction. Ward's 1882 entry into the influential "English Men of Letters" series of literary biographies probes Dickens' life and work before and after “The Pickwick Papers”, his travel writings, David Copperfield, and beyond.