Dickens’s first and funniest novel, published when he was only 25, was a huge worldwide hit that had people lining up on the wharfs in Sydney and New York when the boats came in with the latest instalment.
With a hundred English and American editions before 1900, it was probably the best-selling novel of the whole 19th Century, worldwide.
A comical English version of the Don Quixote/Sancho Panza theme, with an utterly likeable but impractical nouveau riche would-be gentleman from London (…)
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"The Pickwick Papers" (1837) by Charles Dickens
28 March 2021, by Charles Dickens -
"Oliver Twist" (1838), by Charles Dickens
21 March 2021, by Charles DickensThis was the second consecutive worldwide success for Dickens at the age of 26(!), and it was a shock to his vast public, who were looking for another Cockney comedy in the vein of The Pickwick Papers, but got instead a hard-hitting description of some of the most shocking aspects of the social conditions of the world’s most advanced country at the time: criminal child neglect in orphanages, inhuman conditions in public work houses, crime and prostitution ...
This is sock-it-to-’em fiction (…) -
"Nicholas Nickleby" (1839) by Charles Dickens
14 March 2021, by Charles DickensWhere the penniless young Nicholas goes up to the wilds of Yorkshire to begin a teaching career and finds himself with am schoolmaster who’s extravagantly and ruthlessly exploiting and mistreating his pupils there, then flees down south after a dramatic show-down to join a roving band of actors and to get involved in many more pages of rousing and often thoroughly comical adventures peopled by a quite extraordinary number of quite wonderful "Dickensian" secondary personages.
Coming on the (…) -
"The Old Curiosity Shop" (1841) by Charles Dickens
7 March 2021, by Charles DickensDickens’s fourth novel, another huge best-seller, a «road novel» about the adorable Little Nell and her grandfather on the run all around England from a cruel, grasping creditor, no doubt the most villainous villain in all of his works.
The young heroine shines like a beacon through the gloomy moral and physical aspect of England of the times that Dickens was so good at portraying. She caught the imagination of the reading public like few characters before or since ever have.
The Old (…) -
"Barnaby Rudge" (1841) by Charles Dickens
28 February 2021, by Charles DickensDickens’s first historical novel, set in the period of the ultra-violent anti-catholic Gordon Riots in the London of 1780 that saw angry mobs storm into the Parliament buildings, destroy the central Newgate prison and other buildings and shake the state to its very foundations.
The historical novel genre, the untopical subject matter and the unusual simple-minded central figure of the title perhaps explain. at least partially, the public’s initial rejection of the book, which has remained (…) -
Three of A. E. van Vogt’s best late-period stories
25 February 2021, by A. E. van Vogt1. ITSELF! (1963) A militarised surveillance robot in the depths of the Pacific discovers an alien warship lurking in its vicinity and reacts violently to their presence. (1,000 words)
2. LOST: FIFTY SUNS (1972) A gigantic Earth battleship has appeared in the Greater Magellanic Cloud galaxy to search out the rebels from the Milky Way who had hidden there thousands of years before. The leader of the ultra-gifted Mixed Men segment of the Fifty Suns civilization in that galaxy does his best (…) -
"Martin Chuzzlewit" (1844) - where Charles Dickens goes to America
21 February 2021, by Charles DickensThe most interesting aspect of this middle-period Dickens novel is that most of it takes places in the United States, whereto Martin flees to escape from disgrace in London and to make his fortune. However, everyone in New York is a hustler scrambling after the almighty dollar, and things get (much) worse when he goes pioneering down south along the Mississippi river to take possession of a property he has been sold by a glib New-Yorker shyster.
Although the book abounds in stunning (…) -
"Dombey and Son" (1846) by Charles Dickens
18 February 2021, by Charles DickensAfter the huge popular successes of his first four novels and the lukewarm reception by the mass public of the next two, but encouraged by the success of his Christmas Carol stories published in 1843, Dickens raised his sights and clearly aimed at impressing the arbiters of literary good taste, to show them just what he could do.
Dombey and Son thus flows at a calmer, more sedate pace than any of his previous works, with more attention to atmosphere and psychology and with somewhat (...)
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"The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" (1900) by L. Frank Baum
17 February 2021, by L. Frank BaumL. Frank Baum (1856-1919) was a prolific author of novels, short stories, poetry and theatre plays who achieved everlasting posthumous fame when this wonderful story about the adventures of Dorothy and her faithful companions (her dog Toto, a scarecrow without brains, a tin woodman without a heart and a cowardly lion) was made into a memorable Hollywood musical film in 1939 starring the young Judy Garland and directed by Victor Fleming that was later classified by the Library of Congress as (…)
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"David Copperfield" (1850) by Charles Dickens
17 February 2021, by Charles DickensThis portrait of a sensitive young boy’s struggles with his school mentors and with his schoolmates is as powerful and humanistic as anything Dickens or anyone else ever wrote, and the hard-hearted but oh-so-smooth uncle Mr. Murdstone is as worthy a villain — always a Dickens strong point — as any in his oeuvre.
One of Dickens’s best-known and most-read works, with wonderfully characteristic and even famous secondary characters such as the creepy Uriah Heep and the eternally optimistic (…)