The 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 (…)
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"Martin Chuzzlewit" (1844) - where Charles Dickens goes to America
21 February 2021, by Charles Dickens -
"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 (…) -
"Bleak House" (1853) by Charles Dickens
12 February 2021, by Charles DickensA blockbuster of a book, with what was for Dickens a big theme: the incredibly antiquated and abstruse, bureaucratic procedures involved in property legislation via the time-hallowed Chancery Law courts – that however at the time of its publication had already been essentially abolished.
Today the very lengthy satire about the inefficiencies of that antiquated system has lost much of its sting and one can easily find the subject overworked, although it cannot be denied that as a symbol for (…) -
"Hard Times" (1854) by Charles Dickens
5 February 2021, by Charles DickensThe only book in which Dickens ventures into the industrial heartland of the England of his time, the sprawling factory belt in the north around Manchester and Liverpool. Also the shortest of all his novels, slightly above one-third the average length of the others.
The hard-hitting portrayal of the exploitation of workers by unscrupulous factory owners and the poignant description of the near-starvation-level living standards of male and female workers in the burgeoning factory towns of (…) -
"Little Dorrit" (1857) by Charles Dickens
1 February 2021, by Charles DickensIn this very big and wide-ranging opus Dickens follows his eponymous heroine from the Marshalsea Prison for Debtors in south London, where she had lived for the first twenty-plus years of her life and the first half of the book, across France and Switzerland with her newly-rich family on a Grand Tour to Italy, where she spends a couple of years rubbing shoulders with the hordes of semi-expatriate upper-class English that congregated there at the time — the novel is set in the mid-1820s — and (…)
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"A Tale of Two Cities" (1859) by Charles Dickens
20 January 2021, by Charles DickensDickens’s second and best-known (and last) historical novel, the one that starts off with the famous opening lines "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, . . .".
This is one of his shortest novels and also his most overtly political one (with Hard Times), centred as it is on the violent injustices of the French revolution and on the despotism of the ancien régime that Dickens sees as having inevitably led to that (…) -
"Make Westing" and other stories by Jack London
16 January 2021, by Jack LondonTABLE OF CONTENTS
1. The Misogynist (1897) A confirmed bachelor wakes up one morning to find that all females have suddenly disappeared and the world is now a purely masculine one! Things start rapidly going to pot as everyone, including our hero, desperately tries to survive. (8,600 words)
2. Their Alcove (1900) A man watches all the letters and mementos of the woman he had loved burn in his fireplace as he muses over the impact that their break-up has made on his life, and tries to (…) -
"Great Expectations" (1861) by Charles Dickens
15 January 2021, by Charles DickensThis is Dickens at his very best, or rather his greatest. A mature work, his penultimate novel, it gets off to a rousing start – the dramatic encounter of young Pip with an escaped convict takes place on page 2 –, the writing is absolutely sparkling, deeply infused with his profound humanity and his ever-present sense of humour, the characters are finely chiseled and marvelously, even famously full of life – notably the quite unforgettable Joe, and Biddy, and Estella, and Mrs. Haversham, and (…)