In the first book centering on the collaborative relationship between Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, Lillian Nayder places their coauthored works in the context of the Victorian publishing ...industry and shows how their fiction and drama represent and reconfigure their sometimes strained relationship. She challenges the widely accepted image of Dickens as a mentor of younger writers such as Collins, points to the ways in which Dickens controlled and profited from his literary satellites, and charts Collins's development as an increasingly significant and independent author. The pair's collaborations for Household Words and All the Year Round explicitly addressed Victorian labor disputes and political unrest, and Nayder reads the stories in terms of the social and imperial conflicts that both provided their themes and enabled Dickens and Collins to mediate their own personal and professional differences. Nayder's discussion of the collaboration and its principals is greatly enriched by archival research into unpublished and unfamiliar material, including the manuscripts of The Frozen Deep .
The story of the recently discovered London workhouse that Charles Dickens lived almost next door to in the years before he wrote Oliver Twist - told by the historian who did the sleuthing behind ...these exciting new findings.
Dickens and Empire offers a reevaluation of Charles Dickens's imaginative engagement with the British Empire throughout his career. Employing postcolonial theory alongside readings of Dickens's ...novels, journalism and personal correspondence, it explores his engagement with Britain's imperial holdings as imaginative spaces onto which he offloaded a number of pressing domestic and personal problems, thus creating an entangled discourse between race and class. Drawing upon a wealth of primary material, it offers a radical reassessment of the writer's stance on racial matters. In the past Dickens has been dismissed as a dogged and sustained racist from the 1850s until the end of his life; but here author Grace Moore reappraises The Noble Savage, previously regarded as a racist tract. Examining it side by side with a series of articles by Lord Denman in The Chronicle, which condemned the staunch abolitionist Dickens as a supporter of slavery, Moore reveals that the tract is actually an ironical riposte. This finding facilitates a review and reassessment of Dickens's controversial outbursts during the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, and demonstrates that his views on racial matters were a good deal more complex than previous critics have suggested. Moore's analysis of a number of pre- and post-Mutiny articles calling for reform in India shows that Dickens, as their publisher, would at least have been aware of the grievances of the Indian people, and his journal's sympathy toward them is at odds with his vitriolic responses to the insurrection. This first sustained analysis of Dickens and his often problematic relationship to the British Empire provides fresh readings of a number of Dickens texts, in particular A Tale of Two Cities. The work also presents a more complicated but balanced view of one of the most famous figures in Victorian literature.
Charles Dickens had three professional careers: novelist, journalist and public Reader. That third career has seldom been given the serious attention it deserved. For the last 12 years of his life he ...toured Britain and America giving 2-hour readings from his work to audiences of over two thousand. These readings were highly dramatic performances in which Dickens's great gift for mimicry enabled him to represent the looks and voices of his characters, to the point where audiences forgot they were watching Charles Dickens. His novels came alive on the platform: at the end of a reading, it seemed to many that a whole society had broken up rather than that a solitary recitalist had concluded. This book tries to recreate, in greater detail than hitherto, the sense of how those readings were performed and how they were received, how Dickens devised his stage set and tailored his books to make them into performance scripts, how he conducted his reading tours all around the country and developed a quite extraordinary rapport with his listeners. No single study of this late career of Dickens has drawn to such an extent on contemporary witnesses to the readings as well as tried to assess in some depth the significance of what Dickens called 'this new expression of the meaning of my books'. 'I shall tear myself to pieces', he said as he waited eagerly to go on stage for his performance, and that is ironically what he did, in ways he perhaps had not quite intended: he fractured into dozens of different characters up there on the platform, and as he thus tore himself to pieces his health collapsed irretrievably under the pressures he put upon himself to achieve these masterly illusions.
Charles Dickens effectively re-invented periodical literature in the nineteenth century, with his phenomenally popular serialised novels published in the weekly magazines 'Household Words' and 'All ...the Year Round' between 1850 and 1870. Already a world-famous author, Dickens was often the principal contributor of these periodicals, and with that position of power, he was able to direct the gaze of his readership. Through he platform, he was able to encourage public conversation around the issues that most concerned him: poverty, crime, education, public health, women, social welfare and reform. This is a collection of essays from Dickens Journals Online, edited by Hazel MacKenzie and Ben Winyard, exploring both the fiction and the journalism in 'Household Words' and 'All the Year Round', and how they impacted both society in general, and the the wider publishing world. Contributors include: * Laurel Brake * Koenraad Claes * Iain Crawford * Daragh Downes * John Drew * Judith Laura Foster * Holly Furneaux * Ignacio Ramas Gay * Clare Horrocks * Louis James * Patrick Leary * Hannah Lewis-Bill * Helen Mckenzie * Pete Orford * David Parker * David Paroissien * Robert L. Patten * Jasper Schelstraete * Paul Schlicke * Joanne Shattock
Spring of 2021 brought the best of times in a cascade of voices (and not just our own) recognizing, as The Future of Nursing 2020-2030 report said, the "vast expertise and untapped potential of ...nurses at every level and in every setting" (National Academy of Medicine, 2021, p. 14). ...the difference this time is that the majority of these patients did not get the vaccine, which could have prevented most of their illnesses and would not have put nurses and other health care workers at unnecessary risk. ...many health care professionals are struggling with feelings of anger at this behavior in addition to being physically and mentally exhausted.
A unique, in-depth view of Victorian London during the record-breaking summer of 1858, when residents both famous and now-forgotten endured "The Great Stink" togetherWhile 1858 in London may have ...been noteworthy for its broiling summer months and the related stench of the sewage-filled Thames River, the year is otherwise little remembered. And yet, historian Rosemary Ashton reveals in this compelling microhistory, 1858 was marked by significant, if unrecognized, turning points. For ordinary people, and also for the rich, famous, and powerful, the months from May to August turned out to be a summer of consequence.Ashton mines Victorian letters and gossip, diaries, court records, newspapers, and other contemporary sources to uncover historically crucial moments in the lives of three protagonists-Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, and Benjamin Disraeli. She also introduces others who gained renown in the headlines of the day, among them George Eliot, Karl Marx, William Thackeray, and Edward Bulwer Lytton. Ashton reveals invisible threads of connection among Londoners at every social level in 1858, bringing the celebrated city and its citizens vibrantly to life.
Concreteness of texts: concreteness scores and a measuring toolExperimental research into the effects of concreteness on comprehensibility, interestingness and persuasiveness of texts is often ...carried out by comparing versions of texts that differ in terms of concreteness. However, in previous studies concreteness has been manipulated in various ways, making it difficult to compare the experimental outcomes. Therefore, Brysbaert et al. (2014) developed a list of concreteness scores for 30,000 words, based on judgements of students. This list helps researchers to compare the concreteness of texts that have been manipulated for experimental research. Nevertheless, Brysbaert et al.’s (2014) list is incomplete, in the sense that it lacks homonyms, multiword expressions, neologisms and proper names. We have collected concreteness scores for words and word groups in these categories to supplement the ‘Brysbaert’ list. We have also developed the TABLET tool, which gives words in a text a part-of-speech tag, and then searches for the lemma form of the words in the list of concreteness scores as collected by Brysbaert et al. (2014) and us. This tool facilitates the process of determining and manipulating the concreteness of (parts of) texts, and can be used freely by researchers.
