Shortlisted for the HWA Goldsboro Debut Crown It is 31 March 1836. A new monthly periodical is launched entitled The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Conceived and created by the artist Robert Seymour, it contains four of his illustrations. The words to accompany them are written by a young journalist, under the pen-name Boz. The journalist's real name is Charles Dickens. The Pickwick Papers soon becomes a phenomenal, unprecedented sensation, read and discussed by the entire British Isles. Before long, its success is worldwide. Stephen Jarvis's novel tells of the dawning of the age of global celebrity. It is a story of colossal triumph and of the depths of tragedy, based on real events - and an expose of how an ambitious young writer stole another man's ideas.
Throughout his illustrious writing career, Charles Dickens often turned his hand to fashioning short pieces of ghostly fiction. Even in his first successful work, Pickwick Papers, you will find five ghost stories, all of which are included in this collection. Dickens began the tradition of the 'ghost story at Christmas', and many of his tales in this genre are presented here including the brilliant novella, 'The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin', which deserves to be as well known as A Christmas Carol. While all his supernatural tales aim to chill the spine, they are not without the usual traits of Dickens' flamboyant style, his subtle with, biting irony, humorous incidents and moral observations. It is a mixture which makes these stories fascinating and entertaining as well as unsettling. To paraphrase the Fat Boy in Pickwick Papers: Charles Dickens 'wants to make your flesh creep.'
A Charles Dickens short story that was actually the inspiration for "A Christmas Carol." In this story, a gravedigger that hates Christmas gets kidnapped by goblins while digging a grave and then they help him get into the Christmas spirit. The beginning of this version has a biography of the author.
At the height of his career, writing short stories provided Dickens with a release from the formal constraints of his novels and gave free reign to his creative imagination. Ranging from "flights of fancy" to literary masterpieces, Dickens's short stories contained artistic experiments that inspired fuller developments in his novels. Yet the short stories have been all but overlooked in critical discussions. Deborah A. Thomas focuses directly on this body of work, tracing three stages of development. In the early stage until 1840, Dickens produced numerous short stories, culminating in his experience with the abortive Master Humphrey's Clock. In the following ten years, he restricted his writing of short stories to the five Christmas Books but refined his theories about the value of the genre in the context of his work. In the third stage, 1850-1868, Dickens again turned actively to the writing of short stories, many of them the "Christmas Stories" appearing in the weeklies Household Words and All the Year Round, which Dickens edited successively from 1850 to 1869 and from 1859 until his death in 1870. The author concentrates primarily upon the more notable stories, drawing for a perspective upon Dickens' own concept of "fancy." In an increasingly factual age, Dickens—attracted to the unusual and the unknown—found the short story a form in which he could indulge his high degree of fantasy and explore the hidden corners of the mind. Dickens' fascination with psychological abnormality and the supernatural—reflected in his novels—reveals itself even more intriguingly in his short stories. In Thomas's analysis, Dickens' short stories appear as an important key to understanding the novels, while proving worthy in themselves of critical attention. Essential to a thorough study of Dickens, her book sheds light upon previously obscure facets of his developing artistry.
The Old Story, with a Difference: Pickwick's Vision explores in radically different ways from most approaches to nineteenth-century studies the tropes and metaphors of vision in Dickens' first novel, The Pickwick Papers. Julian Wolfreys provides a close reading of Dickens' Pickwick Papers and argues that this novel is an exemplary text for the re-consideration of concepts such as literature, history, the novel, and the whole notion of Victorian studies. True to the purpose of the Victorian Critical Interventions Series, Wolfreys challenges scholars to rethink the use of a canonical text in Victorian literature. Challenging the commonplaces of historicist criticism, and demonstrating the need for a return to close reading, The Old Story, with a Difference presents a reading of the novel grounded in the twinned rigors of materialist historiography and theoretical inflections tending toward attentiveness to epistemological and linguistic concerns. Through such an orientation, Wolfreys unpacks the relation between the tropes of visuality and matters of memory, history, and the necessity of fiction to bear witness to the cultures, past and present, from which literature becomes generated and which it mediates. In doing so, he situates an argument for rethinking Dickens' novel as the inaugural novel of Victorian fiction par excellence, in that novel's efforts to remain open to the traces of the past in particular ways. The Old Story, with a Difference holds profound implications for the study not only of Dickens' works but Victorian literature and culture in general. Provocative and inventive, this ambitious analysis will challenge, goad, and invite the reader to return to acts of materialist reading informed by ethical and ideological urgency, rather than relapsing into the commonplaces of humanist cliché.
Musaicum Books presents to you this carefully created volume of "The Complete Short Stories of Charles Dickens: 190+ Titles in One Volume (Illustrated Edition)". This ebook has been designed and formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. Contents: Christmas Novellas A Christmas Carol The Chimes The Cricket on the Hearth The Battle of Life The Haunted Man Short Story Collections Sketches by Boz Sketches of Young Gentlemen Sketches of Young Couples Master Humphrey' Clock Reprinted Pieces The Mudfog Papers Pearl-Fishing (First Series) Pearl-Fishing (Second Series) Christmas Stories Other Stories Children's Books Child's Dream of a Star Holiday Romance Stories About Children Every Child Can Read Criticism Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens The Limitations of Dickens by Henry James The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot by Andrew Lang David Copperfield by Virginia Woolf Biographies Charles Dickens by G. K. Chesterton The Life of Charles Dickens by John Forster Dickens' London by M. F. Mansfield Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, and by the twentieth century critics and scholars had recognized him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories enjoy lasting popularity.
Before the film industry arrived, Hollywood was filled with quaint bungalows, millionaires' estates, and churches dedicated to teetotalism. Movies shattered Hollywood's tranquillity, and brought wealth, fame and glamorous movie stars. The giants of the movie industry invented klieg-lighted movie premieres and the Academy Awards in Hollywood. Go beyond the star-studded surface to the district's days of union busting, gangsters, and scandal, foreshadowing Hollywood's seedy decline. The book concludes with Hollywood's redevelopment that continues today. The book features the famous faces and places that made the town legendary, offering a unique perspective on celebrity nightlife and the behind-the-scenes stories of day-to-day life. Lavishly illustrated with over 800 vintage images from the author's private collection, "The Story of Hollywood" brings new insights to readers with a passion for Hollywood and its place in the history of film, radio, and television.
