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| Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist
ISBN: 9780674062764
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Harvard University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Dickens Charles 1812–1870; Novelists English -- 19th century -- Biography;
For the 2012 bicentennial of Dickens's birth, Oxford scholar Douglas-Fairhurst examines the man and his times up to 1838: the beginning of the Victorian age, which Charles John Huffam Dickens embodies in the popular imagination. In many ways a self-fabrication and his own greatest work of fiction, Dickens rose from child labor at a blacking factory to the first rank of English authors. With such beginnings, and perhaps because of them, Dickens (whose obsession with a neat and clean appearance, says the author, might today be thought of as exhibiting a form of OCD) had from childhood a love affair with theater and the theatrical, with fashion, with all the outward trappings that might reveal or conceal the soul of motivation. As a young clerk and journalist, he discerned the savage modern trait of alienation. Through it all, not yet 27 by the conclusion of this book, Dickens was a climber and, as an aspiring novelist, had married the daughter of the former adviser to Sir Walter Scott. Dickens invented many selves, says Douglas-Fairhurst, something of a Victorian trait as the multivalent form of the novel developed along with him. Though subdued and overlong, this book captures the chameleon Dickens as a product of his era before he became its creator. 28 photos. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is professor of English literature and a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. His books include Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist and The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland. (Bowker Author Biography) |
