These charming stories quite imbued with the author’s sensitivity and sense of humour are narrated by travellers in Dickens’s early novel "Nicolas Nickleby" (1939) — written when he was only 27 years old — and well deserve to be read and enjoyed on their own by all admirers of the great master of English prose in all its forms.
1. THE FIVE SISTERS OF YORK How the splendid Five Sisters stained-glass window of York Cathedral embodied the memory and life work of five gay young sisters a long (…)
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"The Five Sisters of York" and "The Baron of Grogzwig" — tales by Charles Dickens from his novel "Nicolas Nickleby"
22 avril 2021, par Charles Dickens -
ALL THE NOVELS OF CHARLES DICKENS : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS
1er avril 2021, par RayCharles Dickens (1812-1870) achieved practically overnight world-wide fame at the age of 25 with his phenomenally successful Pickwick Papers, and went on to write many other memorable novels (Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, David Copperfield, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend...) and tales (A Christmas Carol) that established him as one of the foremost authors in the history of English-language literature.
Charles Dickens at the age of 30 INDEX (…) -
"The Pickwick Papers" (1837) by Charles Dickens
28 mars 2021, par Charles DickensDickens’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 (…) -
"Oliver Twist" (1838), by Charles Dickens
21 mars 2021, par 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 (…) -
"Nicholas Nickleby" (1839) by Charles Dickens
14 mars 2021, par 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 mars 2021, par 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 février 2021, par 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 février 2021, par A. E. van VogtOur selection of the three most outstanding stories by the master after taking up writing new science-fiction stories again in 1963 after a 14-year hiatus.
1. 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 (…) -
"Martin Chuzzlewit" (1844) - where Charles Dickens goes to America
21 février 2021, par 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 février 2021, par 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 (...)