Charles Dickens: The Life of the Author
Kenneth Benson
Section 1. The Young Dickens
Section 2. Boz Takes Off Like a Rocket: The Sketches
and Pickwick
Section 3. On Top of the World: Oliver Twist to
Household Words
Section 4. A Fearful Locomotive: The Man Who Never
Slept
Section 5. Dickens Onstage: Up Into the Clouds Together
Section 6. The Great Magician Vanishes
checklist of images
contributors
credits
NYPL, Berg Collection
When Charles Dickens first began to publish the amusing sketches and
stories that would later be collected in his first book, the pseudonymously
published Sketches by Boz (1836), he was a little-known newspaper
reporter working in London. By the end of his amazing career, he had
produced an enormous body of work as both author and editor, including
such classic and perennially popular novels as Oliver Twist, A
Christmas Carol, David Copperfield and Great Expectations.
In this presentation, The New York Public Library's Kenneth Benson surveys
the life and works of the most beloved author of the Victorian era. Readers
will follow Dickens through his childhood, exploring how his writings were
both influenced by and reflected his family history and the wider currents
of Victorian society. Overcoming the hardships of his youth, he launched his
literary career in the 1830s, and his rise was meteoric. This presentation
traces the course of Dickens's ever-increasing fame, from the humorous hijinks
of the early Pickwick Papers to the artistic mastery of the great novels
of the 1850s and 60s.
Providing a lively introduction to the astonishing career of the "Inimitable
Boz," as well as to the heart of a very private man, this presentation is richly
illustrated with handwritten manuscript pages, portraits, prints and drawings,
and other rare artifacts drawn from the special collections of The New York
Public Library, including Dickens's personal custom-bound prompt copies of
his works, which he used in his wildly successful public readings. Charles
Dickens: The Life of the Author celebrates the writer who spoke of his
bond with his immense reading public, with no exaggeration or false modesty,
as "personally affectionate and like no other man's"--and it is a bond that
endures.
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