An Intelligent Person's Guide to Dickens

by Michael Slater

Dickens is one of the greatest literary icons of British culture, an apparently inexhaustible resource for the entertainment industry. This book provides a personal insight into the truth of a famous tribute paid to Dickens the man by a helper on his triumphal public reading "The more you want out of the Master, the more you'll find in him". Ranging widely over Dickens' fiction, journalism, letters and speeches, this book sets out to capture the leading ideas and beliefs, the artistic ideals and ambitions, that inspired and shaped Dickens' prodigious output, offering a guide to 'Dickensian values'

144 pages, Hardcover

First published August 3, 2000

About the author

Michael Slater is Emeritus Professor of Victorian Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London, past President of the International Dickens Fellowship and of the Dickens Society of America, and former editor of the journal The Dickensian. He has taught and continues to lecture widely in the USA, across Europe, Australasia and the Far East.

Read an article by Michael Slater at Yale's London Blog: Charles Dickens: An Attempt on his Life

Reviews

[Peter Kosenko]

Excellent introduction to Dickens. Slater does not go through the works chronologically, which would take too long in any case. He organizes chapters by six ideas: Fancy, Innocence, Progress, Religion, etc., which allows a much shorter and condensed tour through Dickens's characteristic themes.