No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
HE boom in Dickens studies continues; but are the foundations of his newly-acquired reputation really secure? If
T critics have at last managed to justify him as a worthy highbrow interest, the doubt still remains whether much of value and importance in the novelist's art has not been lost in the process. His admitted aim was, after all, to increase the common stock of cheerfulness and humanity among his fellows. But to the modern nonconformist ethos, Dickens's involvement in his own time, so variously reflected in geniality, indignation, and sentimental feeling, is more of an embarrassment than a recommendation. Comedy, characters, storytelling, the genre pictures of nineteenth-century life, every feature in fact that used to captivate the Great Entertainer's audience and still charms the common reader today, are passed over in favour of wider symbolic patterns that are supposed to dominate the novels and guarantee their seriousness by modern standards. 'It is not the function of really artistic productions to contribute to the mirth of human beings', noted Bagehot, and some recent critics seem to echo his severity. But to take a humourist like Dickens as seriously as this may fmally turn out to be a doubtful compliment to his genius. Many of his admirers must surely by now feel a little uneasy at the way his books have been made to reflect the pressures and perplexities of the twentieth century rather than the realities of the nineteenth. Dickens himself, to judge from his occasional remarks on the subject, claimed to be a kind of social historian. Were not those who challenged the accuracy of his facts invited to go away and use their eyes? He was, as Forster reminds us, indifferent to
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Dan Simmons aborda los ΓΊltimos aΓ±os de la vida de Charles Dickens a partir del accidente ferroviario que le cambiΓ³ para siempre. La soledad de Charles Dickens es la inquietante historia de una obsesiΓ³n.El 9 de junio de 1865, mientras viajaba en tren a Londres con su amante secreta, Charles Dickens -
History records that on June 9, 1870, Charles Dickens died of a cerebral haemorrhage. History, however, is wrong. June 9, 1870, is the day on which Emile de la Rue murdered Charles Dickens. During a stay in Genoa in 1844-45, Charles Dickens, an accomplished mesmerist, used his mesmeric abilities to