Dickens Dictionary

Product Description

For fans new & old an enjoyable tour through the world of Dickens in the hands of a master critic. Charles Dickens the Great Inimitable created a riotous fictional world that still lives & breathes for thousands of readers today. But how much do we really know about the dazzling imagination that brought all this into being? For the bicentenary of Dickens birth Victorian literature expert John Sutherland has created a gloriously wide-ranging alphabetical companion to Dickens work excavating the hidden links between his characters themes & preoccupations & the minutiae of his endlessly inventive wordplay. Covering America Bastards Childhood Christmas Empire Fog Larks London Madness Murder Orphans Pubs Punishment Smells Spontaneous Combustion & Zoo to name but a few
- John Sutherland gives us a uniquely personal guide to the great mans work. Excerpt: HANDS; Every Dickens novel has a master image. In Our Mutual Friend it is the river. In Bleak House it is the fog. In Little Dorrit it is the prison. In Great Expectations it is the h&. We often know much more about the principals hands in that novel than their faces. Who when the name Magwitch is mentioned does not think of those murderous large brown veinous hands? Jaggers? Ones nose twitches---scented soap (the lawyer like Pontius Pilate is forever washing his hands). Miss Havisham? Withered claws. So it goes on...