Bloomsbury Literary Studies

Charles Dickens in Europe - Five Things You May Not Know

We're very excited here at the Bloomsbury office to have received our rather beautiful printed copies of the magnificent two-volume Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe. Edited by Michael Hollington and a must for any University Library, this book brings together nearly fifty international contributors to provide a comprehensive survey of Charles Dickens's reception throughout Europe from his own lifetime through to the present day. With guides to major translations in each country and an historical timeline of Dickens's European reception, the book is a fantastic addition to our long-running Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe series.

To celebrate, here's five interesting fact about Dickens's reception in Europe taken from the book, that you might not know:

• The first European-language translation of a Dickens novel was the German edition of The Pickwick Papers, published in 1837.
• Dickens's account of his time in the USA, American Notes, was not published in French until the year 2000.
• One of Dickens's most devoted Danish fans was Hans Christian Andersen - the famous writer of fairy tales - who spent 5 weeks at the Dickens family home in Gad's Hill in the summer of 1857.
• Dickens's most popular book in Poland is A Christmas Carol - the story of Ebenezer Scrooge has been published in no less than 54 different Polish editions.
• The first European film adaptation of a Dickens novel was a 1906 silent French film adaptation of Oliver Twist.

The Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe is available now for library purchase. To find out more about The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe series, please click the link.

The Greatest Literary Moustaches!

It’s Movember and we love a good literary moustache. So much so, we’ve put together a collection of our all-time favourites! From the Walrus to the Mexican, and the Handlebar to the Horseshoe, it seems there is no end to the amount of creative facial topiary in the literary world… Something tells me Shakespeare set a trend.

Mark Twain

‘There has been nothing as good since’ said Ernest Hemingway about Mark Twain’s legendary book Huckleberry Finn. But, he could just as well have been talking about Twain’s famous moustache.

Mark Twain wasn’t without opinion when it came to facial hair, directing the following vitriol towards the beard: ‘it performs no useful function; it is a nuisance and a discomfort; all nations hate it; all nations persecute it with the razor’. Must have been why he plumped for this rather impressive looking moustache. And with matching eyebrows too.

Read our Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair guide to Mark Twain. It reveals all sorts of fantastic facts about this intriguing writer... did you know that he started smoking at 7 and often smoked 40 cigars a day? Nope, me neither. Pretty impressive shocking.

Rudyard Kipling

‘Being kissed by a man who didn’t wax his moustache was like eating an egg without salt’. We couldn't agree more Rudyard Kipling.

This 'tash is so impressive that we've opted for a side portrait shot so you can really see the full depth of this impressive literary bush. Look out for our new book on Rudyard Kipling and Japan - no other leading English literary figure of his day spent so long in that country or wrote so fully about it.

George Orwell

George Orwell said, in his famous 6 Rules for Writing, ‘Never use a long word where a short one will do’. It would seem he had the same approach to moustaches. I’m calling this one... modest yet confident.

George Orwell also wrote an essay in the Evening Standard in 1946 about his rules for drinking tea. Whilst not related in any way to moustaches, I still think it deserves a special mention. Orwell employed the essay as a tool to entertain, illuminate and provoke readers as well as help him fashion his distinctive 'literary' voice. George Orwell the Essayist by Peter Marks gives these compelling pieces the critical attention they merit.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

What can we say about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s moustache? It’s a wonder he had any time to write considering the hours he must have put in taming and trimming this sublime example of facial topiary.  I know what you must be thinking, ‘I WISH I could get my hands on some of his moustache trimmings’. Well, I’m afraid the opportunity has been and passed, with one moustache & ACD fan purchasing his moustache trimmings. They came neatly packaged up in the original envelope they were kept in for so many years with the following inscription: ‘My beloved moustache hairs’. I'm sure the new owner feels the same.

Walt Whitman

Is it a moustache or a beard? Are there side-burns in there? We can't quite figure it out. And that's what makes Walt Whitman's contributions to facial topiary so impressive.

In Whitman’s Queer Children, Catherine Davies looks at 'the anxious relationship between the homosexual and his American home'  in the work of four gay twentieth-century poets - Hart Crane, Allen Ginsberg, James Merrill and John Ashbery. Dwelling on the nurturing adaptable heritage of Walt Whitman, she considers Whitman’s renegotiation of the dialectic between the public and the private as a context for the project of the homosexual epic.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche sports the unique looking walrus-handlebar moustache. Otherwise known as the moustache that launched a thousand philosophical arguments (and its own facebook page). 

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche posits the Übermensch as a goal that humanity can set for itself. Did he set this goal for his own facial hair? There is one thing we can be sure of – he set the philosophical world alight with this revolutionary 'tash.

Still a bit confused? Nietzsche: A Guide for the Perplexed will tell you everything you need to know.

Edgar Allen Poe

It's fair to say that EAP employed his moustache in a rather gothic manner. An article in Scribner’s Magazine in 1878 reveals that 'He wore a dark mustache, scrupulously kept, but not entirely concealing a slightly contracted expression of the mouth and an occasional twitching of the upper lip, resembling a sneer. This sneer, indeed, was easily excited — a motion of the lip, scarcely perceptible, and yet intensely expressive. There was in it nothing of ill-nature, but much of sarcasm … '

So impressive was his moustache that is spawned this imaginative looking t-shirt. If anyone could let me know where to buy it, I’d really appreciate it.

An inescapable black pit, an innocent buried alive, and the deranged hallucinations of a murderer all haunt Tales of Mystery and Imagination - a collection of Edgar Allan Poe's most celebrated chilling stories.

Ernest Hemingway

All hail Ernest Hemingway's contribution to the moustache world! We know that he loved hunting in Africa, bullfighting in Spain, deep-sea fishing in Florida and this is the perfect moustache to match. Hemingway married four times, often falling for one woman while still married to another. With this dashing moustache I think we can see why he was so irresistible to women.

Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez once characterised common European perceptions of Latin America as ‘a man with a moustache and a guitar and a revolver’. He might have kept the moustache, but he certainly broke other pre-existing stereotypes by putting Latin American writing on the literary map.

If a moustache could ever be described as ‘friendly’ then this is certainly it. You can find out more about this compelling man by reading our biography by Gerald Martin and literary guide to Love in the Time of Cholera by Tom Fahy.

Stefan Zweig

Born in Vienna in 1881, Stefan Zweig was one of the most respected authors of his time. And not just for his epic looking moustache. The Economist hailed him as a 'Secret Superstar' and the New Yorker called him an 'Escape Artist' earlier this year.

Foreseeing Nazi Germany's domination of Europe, Zweig and his wife left Austria in 1933. Despairing at Europe's future and feeling increasingly isolated, they committed suicide together in 1942. As Zweig's correspondence all but ceased with the outbreak of World War II, little is known about his final years. Stefan and Lotte Zweig's South American Letters, edited by Darién J. Davis and Oliver Marshall, reproduces personal letters written by the couple during this time and creates a fascinating picture of the last years of this famed author, cast adrift by the rise of Nazism and enforced exile.

Joseph Conrad

Some critics have commented that Joseph Conrad was known for his pessimistic writing style and stark presentation of the human condition. I don’t think he helped matters with this harsh looking moustache. There is one thing that the critics certainly agree upon - Heart of Darkness is a landmark text of 20th century literature that continues to resonate to this day. We certainly love it. One of our latest books, Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ and Contemporary Thought by Nidesh Lawtoo brings this book into philosophical dialogue and includes the first publication in English of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's essay, 'The Horror of the West', described by J. Hillis Miller as 'a major essay on Conrad's novel, one of the best ever written'.

That's it for our literary moustache round up! Of course we couldn't include everyone - Dostoevsky, James Joyce, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Gustave Flaubert... the list could go on and on. It would also be impossible to choose a favourite. But we want to hear from you -  who would get your vote for the most impressive literary moustache? Who can't you believe that we have left out? Is there any obscure Russian writer with a more impressive offering than Nietzsche (probably)?  Let us know so we can add it to our literary moustache hall of fame.

In the meantime, good luck to anyone still plugging away at their Movember efforts. The crowd above would be very proud.

Jenny Tighe

Dracula in Criticism

Dracula has attracted the attention of a remarkable breadth of critical and theoretical approaches over the past 50 years. These range from the most orthodox of 1970s Freudian interpretations to the acerbic historicist rejections of psychoanalysis characteristic of the 1990s, and encompass the intellectual shifts that have blurred the boundaries between feminism and gender studies, and between literary criticism and cultural studies. As a practice, Dracula criticism is intensely self-referential. It is arguably as preoccupied with earlier critical commentary upon the novel as it is with the actual content of Dracula itself. There is no linear pattern of evolution or development in criticism of Stoker’s novel, where, for example, cultural materialism might be seen to succeed psychoanalysis, or feminism to yield to a broader approach through gender studies. Like the vampire, Dracula criticism defies time and chronology: it is simultaneously anachronistic and contemporary, in the sense that new interpretations of Stoker’s novel tend to explicitly parallel, supplement or commentate upon their predecessors while never enforcing a satisfactory closure upon the influence of those earlier critics.

As evidence for this, one need only consider two statements made almost 40 years apart, by Maurice Richardson in ‘The Psychoanalysis of Ghost Stories’ (1959) and Robert Mighall in ‘Sex, History and the Vampire’ (1998), respectively. Writing at the very beginning of Dracula criticism, Richardson contends that the novel must be read ‘From a Freudian standpoint’ because ‘from no other does the story make any sense’. The vampire, and thus the novel, in other words, represent nothing more than the coded expression of a repressed, unspeakable sexuality. Mighall, no doubt mindful of rhetorical closures such as this, is fully prepared to concede that ‘Modern criticism’ insists upon the presence of ‘some “deeper” sexual secret’ behind the ‘supernatural phenomena’ of Dracula. That ‘“deeper” sexual secret’, though, is for Mighall not Victorian but wholly twentieth century: the preoccupations of post-Freudian criticism, in other words, are being read in the place of anything that the vampire might have meant to a Victorian reader. Perversely, while it seeks to dispel the currency of psychoanalytical or sexual interpretations of Dracula, Mighall’s own rhetoric perpetuates their influence. Simply by naming critics committed to exposing the alleged, coded sexuality vested in the Count, Mighall ironically lends them a semblance of authority, intruding their supposedly anachronistic presence into his critical present, and perpetuating their place in the canon of Dracula criticism. Arguably, a reader in the twenty-first century is as likely to find Richardson and his psychoanalytical successors within a recent critical study of Dracula as he or she is to encounter Mighall and his contemporaries.

The enduring intensity of this critical cross-referencing is largely a consequence of the manner in which the early criticism of Dracula deployed the novel’s incidents and components. More recent critics are for the most part careful to locate Dracula within historical, cultural, generic or documented biographical contexts. The earliest critics of the novel, however, frequently took its incidents and perceived symbolism almost in isolation, reading them often simplistically as, for the most part, timeless, self-sufficient and obvious signifiers of a repressed sexuality. The result was an undue reliance not merely upon sexuality as the apparent ‘key’ to Dracula, but also a critical concentration upon a relatively limited number of evocative scenes within the novel. These scenes – and, often, the sexual interpretations and the critics first associated with them – have subsequently come to be deployed as evidence even where sexuality is not the critical focus.

To recall but one, very obvious, example, the evocative substance that is blood in Dracula has attracted a phenomenal range of symbolic interpretations. Many of these, of course, are avowedly sexual. Maurice Richardson, for example, is an orthodox Freudian in his suggestion that blood is an unconscious symbolic substitute for semen in Dracula, where Peter Redgrove and Penelope Shuttle’s suggestion, in The Wise Wound: Menstruation and Everywoman (1978), that the fluid subliminally recalls menstrual discharge may be seen as a logical development from the phallocentrism of early psychoanalysis. The influence of Richardson is, not surprisingly, evident in C. F. Bentley’s influential 1972 study ‘The Monster in the Bedroom: Sexual Symbolism in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, even though that work’s theoretical orientation veers away from the psychoanalytical dogmatism of ‘The Psychoanalysis of Ghost Stories’. However, even where the literal – rather than symbolic – implications of blood form the focus of analysis, sexual symbolism and critics of sexuality appear to be necessarily invoked as a reference point. In a 1989 article otherwise concerned with the physiological processes of blood transfusion, for example, David Hume Flood seems compelled to acknowledge Bentley. Again, in Beyond Dracula: Bram Stoker’s Fiction and Its Cultural Context (2000), William Hughes acknowledges the sexual interpretations advanced by several other critics in a reading of how blood may function as a signifier of linage, family and race. Neither of these works is preoccupied with sexuality. Thus, as Christopher Craft observes, ‘Modern critical accounts of Dracula . . . almost universally agree that vampirism both expresses and distorts an originally sexual energy’, so that, in the words of Jennifer Wicke, ‘It is not possible to write about Dracula without raising the sexual issue.’

All of these critical studies, to a greater or lesser degree, deploy a common range of incidents as evidence, as indeed do many others less concerned with the symbolics of blood. There is a tendency in Dracula criticism, in other words, to reinterpret the same material from the novel rather than to develop new focuses for criticism – and Dracula criticism will be richer when critics consider at length and without prejudice the minor characters and less-explored scenarios of Stoker’s work. For the moment, the only satisfactory way to adequately demonstrate the variety and breadth of critical commentary upon Dracula is to take the scenes customarily regarded as being central to criticism and view them in all their critical plurality. These central scenes are, in order of their appearance in the novel: the depiction of face of Count Dracula, as observed by Jonathan Harker (chapter 2); the attempted ‘seduction’ of Harker by the three female vampires (chapter 3); the staking and ‘death’ of Lucy Westenra (chapter 16); the Count’s attack upon Mina Harker (chapter 21); and – more disparate, in that it is scattered across the extent of the novel – the cohesion of the coalition against Count Dracula. Though often cited and quoted, these scenes do not exist in isolation. Rather, in criticism they have become the central reference points for other events intimately related to their implications, perceived symbolism and narrative consequences. Thus, Jonathan Harker’s account of Count Dracula’s face is intimate to Mina Harker’s ‘scientific’ reading of the vampire’s character in chapter 25, just as Lucy’s trance existence, before and after her conversion to vampirism, is relevant to the Count’s attack upon Mina. These four specific scenes, and the concept of the alliance against the vampire, are, as it were, the staples of Dracula’s critical repertoire – and the pre-existing foundations upon which new interpretations have so often been raised.

- The extract above was taken from our Reader's Guide to Bram Stoker's Dracula by William Hughes. As it's Bram Stoker's 165th birthday today we've made the entire book available to read online (for free) for one day only! You can read it by clicking on this link. We are also going to be giving away a copy via our twitter account - follow us to take part.

Jenny Tighe

A new history of the American bestseller

Must Read: Rediscovering American Bestsellers, edited by Sarah Churchwell and Thomas Ruys Smith, offers a thorough and timely examination of American popular literature, from Charlotte Temple (1794) to The Da Vinci Code (2003). The first book of its kind, Must Read surveys the history of the American bestseller but also provides close critical readings of some of the popular texts that have captivated the American imagination since the nation’s founding.

Since being coined in 1889 by the Kansas Times & Star, the “bestseller” has fueled polarized clashes over its literary and cultural value. An agreement, it seems, is impossible to reach. In their Introduction to Must Read, Churchwell and Ruys Smith chronicle the history of the debate, and examine why exactly it is that some are so opposed to “popular” literature.

“A survey of America’s reading habits over the last 400 years reveals, against a backdrop of flux and churn in the production and consumption of books, a remarkable sense of continuity in the ways in which bestselling texts have functioned in American life. At almost all points, bestsellers have served as a perennial battleground in the theater of war that is popular culture, driving discussions about literary value and the landscape of the literary marketplace, and animating moral panics throughout the ages. Moreover, they have served as a site of profound tension, both between authors whose works sell and those who do not, and between consumers and arbiters of taste—what historian Jill Lepore has described as the ‘democracy of readers…against an aristocracy of critics.’”

Churchwell and Ruys Smith ultimately align themselves with Jane Tompkins’ contention that “it is morally and politically objectionable, and intellectually obtuse, to have contempt for literary works that appeal to millions of people simply because they are popular.” As Paul Gutjahr, the editor of Popular American Literature of the Nineteenth Century, writes, “Although the past two decades have seen a sizeable increase in scholarly interest in bestsellers in the American context, there remains a great deal of unexplored territory. Must Read goes a long way in addressing this deficiency by examining a tremendous range of such literature with great critical care, insight, and theoretical sophistication.”

Must Read takes into account bestsellers of all kinds, starting with the earliest American bestseller, the almanac, to chapbooks—mass-consumed books of “songs, riddles, jokes, anecdotes of pirates and highwaymen…tales of giants, monsters, and fairies” that were favorites of the Puritans—all the way to perhaps the quintessential contemporary bestseller, The Da Vinci Code. It includes contributions from critics such as William Gleason (on Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and literature of the temperance movement), Hsuan L. Hsu (on late nineteenth-century political fiction), Gideon Mailer (on Charlotte Temple), and Ardis Cameron (on Peyton Place and “blockbuster feminism”), and explores, among others, bestsellers such as Ben Hur, Tarzan of the Apes, The Sheik, Etiquette, The Godfather and The Kite Runner.

Must Read is available now in North America and will publish elsewhere in October.

-Hilary Reid, Editorial Intern

Early reviews:

“Must Read breathes new life into the study of best-sellers, rescuing them from not only the enormous condescension of posterity but also from the flattering but often reductive readings of modern academics. For anyone with an interest in the countours of American print culture from the eighteenth century to the present, Must Read is itself a must read work.” - Leon Jackson, University of South Carolina, and author of The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America

“Although the past two decades have seen a sizeable increase in scholarly interest in bestsellers in the American context, there remains a great deal of unexplored territory. Must Read goes a long way in addressing this deficiency by examining a tremendous range of such literature with great critical care, insight, and theoretical sophistication.” - Paul Gutjahr, Indiana University, and editor of Popular American Literature of the Nineteenth Century

“This pathbreaking collection provides a unique contribution to the study of American literature. It is a valuable addition to literary and cultural studies. Must Read is a must read for students and scholars of American popular culture and American literature more generally.” - Lisa Botshon, University of Maine at Augusta, editor of Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American Women Writers of the 1920s

Beyond Discontent: ‘Sublimation’ from Goethe to Lacan

Beyond Discontent, the latest volume in our “New Directions in German Studies,” is by Eckart Goebel, Professor and Chair of German at New York University. The following, by the book’s translator, James C. Wagner, sums up its singular contribution rather neatly:

"The fourth volume in Continuum's New Directions in German Studies series, Beyond Discontent: 'Sublimation' from Goethe to Lacan by Eckart Goebel is a first-of-its-kind study of a concept that has been at the heart of aesthetics and psychoanalysis for well over a century, though it has rarely if ever been clearly defined or theorized. The book provides a sweeping discursive and conceptual history of the idea of sublimation and its implications for the development of Western literature and philosophy, centered around the question of whether our primal drives can actually be transformed and overcome, or whether sublimation always means a renunciation of personal happiness for the sake of cultural achievement. Professor Goebel is equally at home whether he is performing close readings of individual texts by the likes of Goethe and Thomas Mann, or navigating the expansive corpera of prolific writers and thinkers such as Nietzsche and Freud. The truly impressive scope of the essays offered here is matched only by the depth of their arguments and insights. In addition, Professor Goebel's prose throughout is as lively as it is rigorous; it was truly a joy to translate."

We have had some fantastic early comments on the book from Prof. John Hamilton of Harvard University and Prof. Silke-Maria Weineck of the University of Michigan:

"In this highly sophisticated and kaleidoscopic account, Eckart Goebel offers a penetrating study of a topic that, despite its ubiquity, has hitherto failed to receive a sustained and critical analysis: ‘sublimation.’ With theoretical astuteness and literary elegance, philosophical and literary works are brought into fascinating and reciprocally illuminating conversation." -- John T. Hamilton, Professor of Comparative Literature, Chair 2011-2012, Harvard University, USA

“It is good news that we finally have a book on the concept of sublimation, but we are particularly fortunate to have gotten such a smart, profound, and moving one. Beyond Discontent is much more than the exploration of a Freudian concept — it is an extraordinarily successful study in the history of a figure of thought central to all theories of civilization.” -- Silke-Maria Weineck, Associate Professor of German and Chair of Comparative Literature, University of Michigan, USA

Beyond Discontent is available now in North America and will publish elsewhere on June 28th.

Other volumes in "New Directions in German Studies":

 

Improvisation as Art by Edgar Landgraf

Improvisation as Art, the first book in our new series “New Directions in German Studies”, has been insightfully and well-reviewed in the latest issue of the German Quarterly. An extract:

“Both students and scholars of 18th and early 19th-century German literature, as well as anyone interested in modern notions of art and improvisation will benefit highly from this erudite and clearly written study, which expands on Luhmann’s descriptive and avowedly value-free, sociological theory of art and makes it accessible to a wider audience. By including in the discussion also an opponent of systems theory, Jacques Derrida, who insisted on the ‘incalculability of the incalculable’ and on openness for the advent of ‘the other’ (19–29), Landgraf contributes to current debates on ideas of freedom and the role of art and/as improvisation in society, inviting our participation.” -- German Quarterly (Winter 2012, reviewed by May Mergenthaler, The Ohio State University)

Other recently published titles in this series: 

The German Picaro and Modernity by Bernhard Malkmus

Citation and Precedent by Thomas O. Beebee

Happy Birthday Charles Dickens!

It's not every day that you turn 200! To celebrate, I have created exclusive digital previews from some of our best books on Dickens - click the 'preview' buttons below to read!

New Directions in Religion and Literature

As we enter the season of religious holidays, I wanted to flag up the two new titles we’ve just published in what’s fast becoming one of my favourite series here at Continuum: New Directions in Religion and Literature.

The first book is England’s Secular Scripture by Jo Carruthers of the University of Bristol, UK. Ranging from Spenser and Milton, through to Wordsworth, Hardy, Eliot and Orwell, this book explores the development of a “Protestant aesthetic” in English literary history and its contribution to English identity (particular in relation to its “others”, notably Islam). It’s a really fascinating read on an important topic.

Lori Branch of the University of Iowa read an advanced copy of the book and responded: “Carruthers’ volume shows the vitality of the new religion and literature and all it has to offer to mainstream English studies. If this is the harbringer of post-secular scholarship, give me more.”

Do take a look at the free preview we’ve got up and you can find out more about the book here.

The second book – out in the new year so we don’t have a preview up yet – takes a look at Victorian Parables. The Victorian novel is often regarded as golden age of the English realist novel, exemplified by such writers as Charles Dickens and Charlotte Yonge. In this book, Susan E. Colón of Baylor University, USA investigates the often neglected presence and influence of familiar biblical parables in these supposedly realist texts. The book looks at the ways in which many of these writers alluded to, appropriated and played with such familiar parables as the story of the good Samaritan, the prodigal son and Lazarus and the rich man.

You can find out more about the book (which publishes in February) here and I’ll post the free preview when we get it!

Happy Christmas All (and a Merry New Year)!

 

David
Senior Editor,
Continuum Literary Studies

'Best Dickens Biographies' in the Independent

We are delighted that Dickens's Women has been named as one of the 'Best Dickens Biographies' by Boyd Tonkin in the Independent! It is part of a wider article on Charles Dickens, discussing his canny commercial approach to marketing himself in the 19th century and how, like Shakespeare, the Dickens brand has thrived to this day - on an international scale across many generations.

Even as 'an author who did little to hide the sharp commercial voracity that ran alongside his abundant literary talent' I still findit astounding that he earned (the equivalent of) £30,000 per night on his dynamic one-men show tour! That is pretty impressive even by celebrity standards these days.

It is a fascinating article and well worth reading so do click on the link above.

With the bicentenary fast approaching next year, we are set for a Dickens frenzy of exhibitions, plays, debates, films and, of course, books! Dickens's Women by Anne Isba looks at the emotional life of Charles Dickens, examining his relationships with some of the women to whom he was closest - including the mother who failed to recognise his early promise; the young woman who spurned him before he was famous; the wife he cast aside in middle age; the benefactress for whom he managed a house for 'fallen women'; and the actress, less than half his age, with whom he spent his final years. You can read a digital preview of this book by clicking on the 'preview' button above.

Do let us know your take on Dickens, or link us to any exciting events taking place in 2012 that you know about or are involved in organising. It would be good to blog about these as I for one am really looking forward to immersing myself in all things Dickens! The BFI's Dickens on Screen season looks really interesting (and only a stone's throw from our London Waterloo offices too!).

Jenny Tighe

Marketing Executive

Dickens and Women

‘My father did not understand women,’ Charles Dickens's daughter, Katey Dickens, confided to her friend and biographer Gladys Storey.

Some of the women whose lives were touched by Victorian England’s greatest novelist, the writer who called himself the ‘Inimitable’ one, will have felt that the sentiment was entirely mutual. Charles Dickens’s close relationships with women were always complex, often contradictory, and sometimes manipulative and hurtful.  Almost invariably, they left him feeling that he was missing something, something undefined that lingered just beyond his grasp.

Publishing to coincide with the bicentenary of his birth, Dickens's Women by Anne Isba looks at the emotional life of Charles Dickens, examining his relationships with some of the women to whom he was closest.

They include the mother who failed to recognise his early promise; the young woman who spurned him before he was famous; the wife he cast aside in middle age; the benefactress for whom he managed a house for 'fallen women'; and the actress, less than half his age, with whom he spent his final years.

Each woman casts light on a different aspect of Dickens's personality. But they were united by a common theme: whatever they gave him, it was rarely enough to satisfy Dickens's sense of entitlement.

 We are delighted that the book was reviewed on The BookBag earlier this week:

'[This book] reveals that he was a complex, many-sided character with perhaps unrealistic expectations (a case of too great expectations, perhaps?) from those in his life. In this case, the artistic temperament of a creative yet restless soul evidently did not have the makings of a good and faithful husband. As the last sentence reads, Charles Dickens would always have wanted more.'

To read the Introduction to the book, click on the 'preview' button above!

Jenny

Marketing Executive