Charles Dickens – Interesting Literature

A Summary and Analysis of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in six weeks during October and November 1843, and the novella (technically, it is not counted among his novels) appeared just in time for Christmas, on 19 December. The book’s effect was immediate.

The Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle went straight out and bought himself a turkey after reading A Christmas Carol, and the novelist Margaret Oliphant said that it ‘moved us all in those days as if it had been a new gospel’. Even Dickens’s rival, William Makepeace Thackeray, called the book ‘a national benefit’.

A Summary and Analysis of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Great Expectations is one of Dickens’s most popular novels: perhaps only Oliver Twist and David Copperfield are equally well-known and well-regarded among his full-length novels (A Christmas Carol, technically a novella, is surely his most famous book of all).

Not bad for a novel which Dickens only started writing because another novel, by his now-forgotten contemporary Charles Lever, was proving extremely unpopular with readers of Dickens’s magazine, All the Year Round, and Dickens realised he needed to produce a replacement which would halt the dwindling circulation of the publication.

10 of the Best Short Stories by Charles Dickens

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Charles Dickens (1812-70) is best-known for his fifteen novels and for shorter books like A Christmas Carol. However, Dickens’s was a restless talent, and during his publishing career that spanned more than thirty-five years, he also wrote countless articles, essays, and short stories.

Dombey and Son: The Themes of Dickens’s Railway Novel

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the comic genius of Dickens in one of his less well-known novel

Dombey and Son is some way from being Charles Dickens’s most popular novel. Indeed, of his fifteen full-length novels, it’s probably down there at the bottom, alongside Barnaby Rudge. The last television adaptation of Dombey and Son was back in 1983 (you can watch this adaptation online here; I used to work with the chap who played Mr Toots, who went on to become a lecturer and Baptist minister).

Dickens’s Most Neglected Book: A Child’s History of England

In this week’s Dispatches from the Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle celebrates Dickens’s forgotten history book for children

A Child’s History of England (1851-3) occupies a unique place among Dickens’s works. The only one written specifically for children, and the only book-length work of history he wrote, it is the most neglected of all his books, and has long been overlooked by both critics and readers.

There has been no scholarly edition of A Child’s History of England published by any of the leading publishers, and few studies of Dickens’s writing – even his non-fiction writing – provide any sustained analysis or treatment of the book. Critical opinion has generally been unfavourable: epithets including ‘puerile’ and ‘weak’ have been used to describe it.