The Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Dickens [Paperback]

The Bedside Dickens provides a lively look at this great novelist's life and career. It sheds light on his role as a polemicist and journalist and explores the way his work was long informed by his Christian faith. It also reveals his most persistent literary themes and provides a vivid sense of how, among his contemporaries, Dickens' vast success-and his radical politics-provoked both admiration and scorn. Dickens, this study reminds us, saw life as a battle, but as both a novelist and journalist he sought to provide a more hopeful worldview. He repeatedly satirized vice and folly, even as he urged his readers and the leaders of his day to be less selfish and narrow and to do good always.

Chapters and topics include: Dickens and Animals; Christmas Stories; The Magnetizer; Dickens vs. Thackeray; A Christian Writer; Dickens Down Under; What Dickens Read; Dickens and Spontaneous Combustion; Dickens and Journalism; Dickens on the Couch.

Part 1 - The Inimitable Icon Life with Father What Gets Blacked in a Blacking Factory?Dickens's BookshelfSidebar: Dickens's Favourite BooksFrom the Gallery - Dickens's work as a Parliamentary reporterSidebar: A Short Look at Shorthand I'll Never Stop Saying Maria --rejection by Maria BeadnellCapsule: Sketches by Boz (1836)The Boz StyleCapsule: The Pickwick Papers (1836)Men with Pens: Dickens's IllustratorsPart 2 continues a Virtual Walking Tour to places associated with Dickens's life and workIncludes Capsules on Life and Adventures of Nichloas Nickleby (1830), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840), Barnaby Rudge (1841) Who Was Gordon and Why Did He Riot? anti-Catholicism in Dickens's DayCapsule: Martin Chuzzlewit (1844)Sidebar: A Dickens's Crossword PuzzlePart 3 continues the Walking Tour adn includes Capsules of David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, et al.Sidebar: Dickens and W. C. FieldsSidebar: Dickens in NighttownWas Dickens a Liberal or a Conservative?Sidebar: Dickens l“+