Dickens and the Business of Death

Dickens and the Business of Death
Author: Claire Wood
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2015-03-05
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1107098637

The first ever full-length study exploring how Dickens's fiction engaged with, responded to, and even exploited Victorian attitudes to death.

Touché

Touché
Author: John Leigh
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2015-06-08
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0674504380

Many of the West’s best writers fought in duels or wrote about them, seduced by glamour or risk or recklessness. A gift as a plot device, the duel also offered a way to discover how we face fears of humiliation, pain, and death. John Leigh’s literary history of the duel illuminates these and other tensions attending the birth of the modern world.

Dombey and Son

Dombey and Son
Author: Charles Dickens
Publisher:
Total Pages: 564
Release: 1848
Genre: English fiction
ISBN:

Paul Dombey is a cold, unbending, pompous merchant, and a widower with two children - Paul and Florence. His chief ambition is to perpetuate the firm-name. He dreams of passing his business on to his son. Dombey dotes on his son, and neglects and mistreats his daughter.The "son" in the title of the book is incapable of ever joining the firm. A sickly and odd child, Paul dies at the age of six. Dombey pours his resentment and anger out on his daughter, whom he pushes away despite her efforts to earn her father's love.Eventually Dombey remarries, after literally acquiring his new wife from her father in a commercial transaction. Dombey is as bad a husband as he is a father and his marriage is loveless. His new bride hates Dombey and eventually runs off with Canker, his business manager. Dombey characteristically blames Florence for this reversal, and strikes her, causing Florence to run away as well.Abandoned by everyone, Dombey loses his business and goes half insane, living in his decaying house. Dombey is eventually reconciled to his daughter, who always a doormat forgives her father........

A Christmas Carol Murder

A Christmas Carol Murder
Author: Heather Redmond
Publisher: Kensington Books
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2020-09-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1496717201

In this clever reimagining of Charles Dickens’s life, he and fiancée Kate Hogarth must solve the murder of an old miser, just before Christmas . . . London, December 1835: Charles and Kate are out with friends and family for a chilly night of caroling and good cheer. But their blood truly runs cold when their singing is interrupted by a body plummeting from an upper window of a house. They soon learn the dead man, his neck strangely wrapped in chains, is Jacob Harley, the business partner of the resident of the house, an unpleasant codger who owns a counting house, one Emmanuel Screws. Ever the journalist, Charles dedicates himself to discovering who's behind the diabolical defenestration. But before he can investigate further, Harley's corpse is stolen. Following that, Charles is visited in his quarters by what appears to be Harley's ghost—or is it merely Charles’s overwrought imagination? He continues to suspect Emmanuel, the same penurious penny pincher who denied his father a loan years ago, but Kate insists the old man is too weak to heave a body out a window. Their mutual affection and admiration can accommodate a difference of opinion, but matters are complicated by the unexpected arrival of an infant orphan. Charles must find the child a home while solving a murder, to ensure that the next one in chains is the guilty party . . . Praise for the Dickens of a Crime Mysteries! “Mystery fans and history buffs alike should cheer.” —KirkusSTARRED Review “Sharp, incisive, and delightfully twisty. I’m sure I won't be the only reader exclaiming, ‘What the Dickens?!’” —Anna Lee Huber, bestselling author. “As easy to read as one of Mr. Dickens’ actual novels and as entertaining.” —New York Journal of Books “Fans of Anne Perry will love this one.” —Dianne Freeman, award–winning author

Murder by the Book

Murder by the Book
Author: Claire Harman
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2020-02-04
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 0525436154

Early on the morning of May 6, 1840, the elderly Lord William Russell was found in his London house with his throat so deeply cut that his head was nearly severed. The crime soon had everyone, including Queen Victoria, feverishly speculating about motives and methods. But when the prime suspect claimed to have been inspired by a sensational crime novel, it sent shock waves through literary London and drew both Dickens and Thackeray into the fray. Could a novel really lead someone to kill? In Murder by the Book, Claire Harman blends a riveting true-crime whodunit with a fascinating account of the rise of the popular novel and the early battle for its soul among the most famous writers of the day.

Dickens, Death, and Christmas

Dickens, Death, and Christmas
Author: Robert L. Patten
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2023-05-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 019267711X

"Marley was dead, to begin with." Why does the most beloved of Christmas books open with a death? What has death to do with Christmas and New Years, and with Dickens's Christmas books and stories over his entire life? This book starts at the Paris Morgue and takes Dickens through his Christmas experiences from childhood and beyond, his celebrations of the season, and the sorrows that he often reviews in the New Year. Robert L. Patten weaves together Dickens's life, career, writings, journalism, travel, theatrical presentations, and religious convictions to offer a richly designed and entertaining narrative, fulsomely illustrated, of the manifold ways Dickens figures the spirit and traditions of the winter holidays in Victorian England. Both the gothic of ghosts and retribution and what he saw as the grotesque of lower-class enjoyment surface importantly in Dickens's fantasies. This volume discloses many hitherto overlooked connections between Dickens's writings and life and arrives at some surprising conclusions about Dickens's imagination, understanding of the conditions and meaning of Christian life, and the failures of British society to meet the pressing needs of its people. Not only does it address the public reception of these writings; it also tracks the responses and understandings of Dickens's illustrators, friends who found novel ways of telling, and mis-telling, the stories.

The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens

The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens
Author: Robert L. Patten
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 848
Release: 2018-09-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191061123

The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens is a comprehensive and up-to-date collection on Dickens's life and works. It includes original chapters on all of Dickens's writing and new considerations of his contexts, from the social, political, and economic to the scientific, commercial, and religious. The contributions speak in new ways about his depictions of families, environmental degradation, and improvements of the industrial age, as well as the law, charity, and communications. His treatment of gender, his mastery of prose in all its varieties and genres, and his range of affects and dramatization all come under stimulating reconsideration. His understanding of British history, of empire and colonization, of his own nation and foreign ones, and of selfhood and otherness, like all the other topics, is explained in terms easy to comprehend and profoundly relevant to global modernity.

Death and Mr Pickwick

Death and Mr Pickwick
Author: Stephen Jarvis
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 818
Release: 2015-05-21
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1448192005

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.