Becoming Dickens
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
Becoming Dickens
Becoming Dickens tells the story of how an ambitious young Londoner became England's greatest novelist. In following the twists and turns of Charles Dickens's early career, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst examines a remarkable double transformation: in reinventing himself, he argues, Dickens reinvented the form of the novel. It was a high-stakes gamble, and Dickens never forgot how differently things could have turned out.
4.3 out of 5 based on 5 reviews
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Omniscore:
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| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
Biography, Literary Studies & Criticism |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
400 |
| RRP |
£20.00 |
| Date of Publication |
October 2011 |
| ISBN |
978-0674050037 |
| Publisher |
Harvard University Press |
| |
Becoming Dickens tells the story of how an ambitious young Londoner became England's greatest novelist. In following the twists and turns of Charles Dickens's early career, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst examines a remarkable double transformation: in reinventing himself, he argues, Dickens reinvented the form of the novel. It was a high-stakes gamble, and Dickens never forgot how differently things could have turned out.
Reviews
The New Statesman
A.N. Wilson
"Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's Becoming Dickens is the freshest and most insightful book I have read on this great theme since my first schoolboy reading of House … It is hard to imagine a better book on Dickens than Douglas-Fairhurst's appearing in the coming months. I shall treasure it."
10/10/2011
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The Daily Telegraph
Frances Wilson
"... Douglas-Fairhurst, who has every line ever written by Dickens at his fingertips, inhabits [the novels]; he shows us the internal process of the writing, revealing the hidden jokes, the coded messages, the ways in which “the most central and eccentric literary figure of the age” wove his other selves into his texts."
24/10/2011
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The Literary Review
John Sutherland
"What is extraordinarily fresh in Becoming Dickens is Douglas-Fairhurst's ability to support [his] arguments by sensitive explication de texte … Robert Douglas-Fairhurst reads Dickens the author with brilliant acuity."
05/10/2011
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The Sunday Times
John Carey
"[A] subtle and searching book … Dickens made his early fiction, Douglas-Fairhurst argues, out of lives he escaped from himself. During his ordeal at the blacking warehouse he might easily have become, as he later wrote, “a little robber or a little vagabond”, and imagining that outcome generated Oliver Twist."
02/10/2011
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