Author of 'Dickens and Popular Entertainment' and the recent ‘Simply Dickens’, General Editor of ‘The Oxford Companion to Dickens’ and editor of the forthcoming Clarendon Edition of ‘Sketches of Boz’. Past President of the Dickens Fellowship.
Author of 'Dickens and Popular Entertainment' and the recent ‘Simply Dickens’, General Editor of ‘The Oxford Companion to Dickens’ and editor of the forthcoming Clarendon Edition of ‘Sketches of Boz’. Past President of the Dickens Fellowship.
Which Dickens novel should be read and appreciated more?
It's hard to say because different readers at different times have responded more to one rather than to another. In the 19th century, 'The Pickwick Papers' was incomparably popular, and... Читать далее
Author of 'Dickens and Popular Entertainment' and the recent ‘Simply Dickens’, General Editor of ‘The Oxford Companion to Dickens’ and editor of the forthcoming Clarendon Edition of ‘Sketches of Boz’. Past President of the Dickens Fellowship.
Did Charles Dickens create our idea of the Victorians?
I think so. Because he was so widely read and because he was so much attuned to the temper of the times, both in what he celebrated and what he deplored and attacked, for very many of us... Читать далее
Author of 'Dickens and Popular Entertainment' and the recent ‘Simply Dickens’, General Editor of ‘The Oxford Companion to Dickens’ and editor of the forthcoming Clarendon Edition of ‘Sketches of Boz’. Past President of the Dickens Fellowship.
What are the five best Dickens adaptations in the movies?
From the very outset of his career, Dickens’s plays were dramatised for the stage. There were frequently several versions of his novels running in the London theatres before he’d even... Читать далее
Author of 'Dickens and Popular Entertainment' and the recent ‘Simply Dickens’, General Editor of ‘The Oxford Companion to Dickens’ and editor of the forthcoming Clarendon Edition of ‘Sketches of Boz’. Past President of the Dickens Fellowship.
Where do Dickens' bizarre character names come from?
The first thing is that he had a fertile comic imagination and he's particularly alert to sounds and to sights – it's a very visual and aural imagination. He's able to find names that are... Читать далее
Author of 'Dickens and Popular Entertainment' and the recent ‘Simply Dickens’, General Editor of ‘The Oxford Companion to Dickens’ and editor of the forthcoming Clarendon Edition of ‘Sketches of Boz’. Past President of the Dickens Fellowship.
The quick answer is 'no'. Christmas obviously goes back centuries and what had happened was that during the Puritan revolution in the seventeenth century, the movement went away from... Читать далее
Author of 'Dickens and Popular Entertainment' and the recent ‘Simply Dickens’, General Editor of ‘The Oxford Companion to Dickens’ and editor of the forthcoming Clarendon Edition of ‘Sketches of Boz’. Past President of the Dickens Fellowship.
I think that's very tricky. His attitudes aren't particularly philosophical, they're not intellectual, they're very much emotional. He is radical in the Victorian sense of radical in that... Читать далее
Author of 'Dickens and Popular Entertainment' and the recent ‘Simply Dickens’, General Editor of ‘The Oxford Companion to Dickens’ and editor of the forthcoming Clarendon Edition of ‘Sketches of Boz’. Past President of the Dickens Fellowship.
I think the answer to that is to ask what kind of novelist he is. And I think, to be anachronistic, Dickens writes magical realism. That is to say his fiction is very firmly rooted in the... Читать далее
Author of 'Dickens and Popular Entertainment' and the recent ‘Simply Dickens’, General Editor of ‘The Oxford Companion to Dickens’ and editor of the forthcoming Clarendon Edition of ‘Sketches of Boz’. Past President of the Dickens Fellowship.
It’s slightly misleading to talk about it in that way in that it suggests that there’s a polemic purpose behind his fiction. He certainly has strong convictions and overt themes in his... Читать далее