Articles
A Christmas Story, But Not by Charles Dickens
It’s hardly a coincidence that this tale surfaces just before Christmas. It’s about a new book set in the European skies in 1943. Military historian Adam Makos,...
Counting Down Dickens' Greatest Novels. Number 2: Great Expectations
Great Expectations begins in the place where all expectations come to an end. Little Philip Pirrip, known as Pip, sits shivering in a graveyard, looking at the...
Charles in Charge
In 1812, the year Charles Dickens was born, there were 66 novels published in Britain. People had been writing novels for a century--most critics date the genre...
Top 10 Non-Dickens Books for Dickens Fans
Dickens wrote fourteen and a half novels, which means that any devotee of his work runs the risk of running out. We recommend the titles below to fill the void...
Wednesday Words: From Divas to Dickens and More
The definition of defiance: iconoplasts An iconoclast, as you may remember from European History class, is a person who attacks cherished beliefs; a breaker and...
From Downton to Dickens: See the Trailer for Masterpiece: Great Expectations
Today, as we celebrate the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens by unveiling the final book in our Blogging the Dickens series, PBS has gone and unveiled a trailer...
Counting Down Dickens' Greatest Novels. Number 4: David Copperfield
I have read David Copperfield many times now, and every time I pick it up again I think, Oh, it can’t be as good as I remember. It’s the story of a young boy who...
Why to Read Dickens Now (Or Watch Him on TV)
When Charles Dickens began writing his first novel—in 1836, the year before Victoria took the throne—the literacy rate in England was less than 50 percent. By...
Counting Down Dickens' Greatest Novels. Number 7: The Pickwick Papers
For decades after Dickens’ death, Pickwick remained his most beloved book.
Counting Down Dickens' Greatest Novels. Number 10: Oliver Twist
Honestly, little Oliver's a bit dull. The novel’s best side is its dark side, and Dickens knew it.
Dickens Turns 200 This Year. We Will Blog His Ten Best Books
We'll focus on the quirks, the marginalia, the backstory and the language — all the tiny touches that make his work entertaining and inventive and special, two...
Counting Down Dickens' Greatest Novels. Number 8: Hard Times
It’s dawning on me that the marriage plot, which maps so well onto novels by Austen and the Brontës and George Eliot, is misapplied to Dickens. It is far more...
Counting Down Dickens' Greatest Novels. Number 9: Dombey and Son
I cried when Paul Dombey died, but I wasn’t the only one. When the fifth installment of Dombey and Son was published in 1847 — the chapter in which the fragile...
What the Dickens.
Not many people know that Charles Dickens was an actor as well as a writer. A workaholic who was haunted by memories of his impoverished childhood, when he...
Video: A Moody Swirl of Dickens: BLEAK HOUSE
The novel opens, famously, with fog: the dense murk that envelops London but settles thickest around the High Court of Chancery. Out of it swirls a teeming cloud...
Books: Fulfilling Expectations
Banished for life to New South Wales, a convict eventually returns to 19th century London, risking hanging if the law discovers him, all because he wants to see...
Cinema: What The Dickens!
Fagin, Scrooge, Uriah Heep, Mr. Micawber and Mrs. Jellaby -- so many of Charles Dickens' great grotesques lurk in memory with the clarity of caricatures. They...
Theater: Detection Kit the Mystery of Edwin Drood
Charles Dickens died having finished only half of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and that tantalizing incompleteness has prompted countless attempts to round off...
Books: The Spirit of Christmas Present
CHARLES DICKENS: HIS TRAGEDY AND TRIUMPH by Edgar Johnson; Viking; 601 pages; $15 Near the end of A Handful of Dust ( 1934), Evelyn Waugh sentenced one of his...
