Further Reading

Your first job is to study the text. There is no substitute for the work of detailed analysis. Once you are familiar with the text itself, you may wish to read around and about it. This brief chapter is only intended to set you off: there are hundreds of relevant essays, articles and books and we can only mention a few. Most good editions and critical works have suggestions for further reading or bibliographies of their own. Once you have begun to read beyond your text, you can use these and a good library to follow up your particular interests. This chapter is divided into Works by Charles Dickens; Reading around the text, which lists some works by other writers, which are contextually relevant either by date, content or genre; Biography, which lists some of the many accounts of Dickens’s life; and Criticism, which gives a selection of suggested titles that will introduce you to the varieties of opinion among professional critics.

Works by Charles Dickens

Dickens wrote fourteen and a half novels, and if you want to read just one more Dickens novel, choose Great Expectations (1860–1861), regarded by many as his best work. In this book we have focused on Bleak House (1852–1853) and Hard Times (1854). None of Dickens’s other novels is similar to Hard Times. It is much shorter than any other, and is the only book by Dickens set in the industrial north. We have suggested that Bleak House belongs with Dombey and Son (1846–1848) and Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865) as all three novels present a panoramic view of society. David Copperfield (1849–1850), Great Expectations (1860–1861), Nicholas Nickleby (1838–1839) and Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–1844), all tell the story of a boy’s life from childhood to adulthood. Aside from Bleak House, in which Esther tells half of the story, Dickens wrote two further novels where the protagonist is a young girl: The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–1841) and Little Dorrit (1855–1857). The other novels are The Pickwick Papers (1836–1837), Oliver Twist (1837–1839), Barnaby Rudge (1841) and A Tale of Two Cities (1859). These last two are historical, the former set during the Gordon Riots of 1780, the latter in London and Paris during the French Revolution and subsequent Reign of Terror (1789–1793). Finally, a Dickens enthusiast may look at the earliest published work, which made the author’s reputation, and read Sketches by Boz (1836), as well as the unfinished mystery he was writing when he died, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870).

Dickens also wrote numerous short stories, and was a prolific journalist. A good example from his short stories is ‘The Signalman’, a ghost story from the 1866 Christmas edition of All the Year Round. In the 1840s, Dickens also wrote special Christmas novellas, the best known of which is A Christmas Carol (1843) with its miserly Scrooge and the sick child, Tiny Tim. This was followed by The Chimes (1844), The Cricket on the Hearth (1845) and two more. The three named here were often on Dickens’s programme at his public readings, as they fit well into an abridged form. The whole of Household Words and All the Year Round are available online at www.djo.org.uk. We already said that anyone studying Hard Times should read the article ‘On Strike’ from Household Words, 11 February 1854. You may also want to browse through Dickens’s other articles. There are political satires about the family of Mr. Bull (John Bull and family = the British Government), or attacks on the law, institutions, hypocrisies and humbug, and you will quickly gain a feeling for Dickens’s life as a working journalist.

For his own children, Dickens wrote A Child’s History of England (1851–1853) and The Life of Our Lord (published in 1934). The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens, edited by Jenny Hartley (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012) is more approachable than the huge Pilgrim Edition The Letters of Charles Dickens, edited by Madeline House, Graham Storey, and Kathleen Tillotson (12 volumes, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1965–2002).

You can read almost all of Dickens’s writings online, free, from such websites as Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org) or the Dickens’s journals website mentioned above. In this way you can dip into a variety of texts, and quickly become familiar with a range of his works.

Reading around the text

This section suggests some novels to consider when ‘reading around’ Dickens. Among Dickens’s predecessors you may try Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), one of Dickens’s favourite novels: he named his eighth child Henry Fielding. To gain an idea of the Gothic melodramatic tradition that was so influential at the beginning of the nineteenth century, look at Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). In Dickens’s final years, the first novels written by George Eliot appeared. Try The Mill on the Floss (1860): the characterisation of Maggie Tulliver may seem surprisingly modern, in contrast to that of Esther Summerson in Bleak House.

Having mentioned predecessors and a successor, the next suggestion is to sample Dickens’s contemporaries. One novel uncomfortably close to Hard Times in date and theme is Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854–1855). A wide-ranging work portraying a ‘panorama’ such as we find in Bleak House, is William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–1848). Thackeray’s image for the social world as a ‘vanity fair’ is reminiscent of the ‘In Fashion’ strand in Bleak House, although many readers think that Thackeray’s analysis is more cynical, and therefore more rigorous, than Dickens’s. Next, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (both 1847) have elements of the Gothic, and passionate fables. Finally, Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) was a close friend of Dickens. They collaborated on the melodrama The Frozen Deep, in which Dickens acted the tragic role of Wardour, and on several of the Christmas numbers of Household Words. Collins wrote successful novels of crime and mystery, and developed a technique in which different narrators tell those parts of the story in which they were most involved, rather as Esther tells her parts of Bleak House. Try Collins’s The Woman in White (1859–1860). There are others we could mention, of course. Both Thackeray and Wilkie Collins wrote numerous other works, and Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) published his first Barsetshire novel, The Warden (1855) the year after the publication of Hard Times.

Biography

There are many biographies of Dickens. The first was the life written by his close friend and official biographer, John Forster. It was to Forster that Dickens entrusted the Autobiographical Sketch, which revealed his childhood hardships – working in a factory while his family was in the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison. Forster was true to his friend, and published the Life of Charles Dickens in three volumes between 1872 and 1874. There is an abridged, illustrated edition available, edited by Dr. Holly Furneaux and published by Sterling Signature, NY, 2011; the full original text can be read on project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org).

We will mention just three for you to choose from, of the many other biographies of Dickens that are available. Charles Dickens: A Life, by Claire Tomalin (London, NY et al.: Penguin Books, 2011) is readable, and has some useful lists of families and other people, and maps of Dickens’s homes in London and Kent, at the beginning. Michael Slater’s Charles Dickens (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011) is also well written, detailed and reliable. Neither of these shirks the awkward questions about Dickens’s behaviour to his wife Catherine. Peter Ackroyd’s massive Dickens (first US edition, NY: Harpercollins, 1991), can still be obtained, but the abridged edition (London: Vintage, 2002), gives us another clear narrative of Dickens’s life. Any of these biographies will provide the background information you need.

Criticism

We mentioned some critical works from between Dickens’s death and recent years, in our ‘Sample of Criticism’ chapter, and these make a reliable foundation for your reading of recent critical views. George Bernard Shaw’s Shaw on Dickens (edited by Dan H. Laurence and Martin Quinn, Frederick Ungar, NY, 1985); G. K. Chesterton’s Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens (London & NY: Dent & Dutton, 1911); and George Orwell’s essay ‘Charles Dickens’ in Inside the Whale and Other Essays (London: Gollancz, 1940), were all influential studies in their time. We also mentioned some negative reactions to Dickens, found in works by George Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Aldous Huxley, as well as in F. R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition (London & NY: Faber and Faber, 1948). If you are interested in the Leavisites’ controversies, F. R. Leavis and Q. D. Leavis revised their view of Dickens, devoting a whole critical work to him: Dickens the Novelist (London & NY: Penguin Books, 1970). In view of our discussion of the theatrical effects Dickens achieves, you may also be interested in Robert Garis’s The Dickens Theatre: A Reassessment of the Novels (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965).

The four more recent critical works we summarised in Chapter 10 are, first, Juliet John’s Dickens’s Villains: Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture (Oxford & NY: Oxford University Press, 2001); second, Valerie Purton’s Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition: Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Lamb (London & NY: Anthem Press, 2012); third, Pam Morris’s Dickens’s Class Consciousness: A Marginal View (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991); and finally, Stephen J. Spector’s ‘Monsters of Metonymy: Hard Times and Knowing the Working Class’, in Modern Critical Views: Charles Dickens, edited by Harold Bloom (Chelsea House Publishers, NY and Philadelphia, 1987), pp. 229–244.

Modern critics take a wide variety of approaches to Dickens. We mentioned Barbara Hardy’s Dickens and Creativity (London & NY: Continuum Literary Studies, 2008); Hilary M. Schor’s Dickens and the Daughter of the House (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), and Alexander Welsh’s Dickens Redressed: The Art of Bleak House and Hard Times (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2000). To these could be added Catherine Waters’s Dickens and the Politics of the Family (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), Philip Collins’s Dickens and Crime (Basingstoke & NY: Macmillan, 1995), John R. Reed’s Dickens’s Hyperrealism (Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2010) and Michaela Mahlberg’s Corpus Stylistics and Dickens’s Fiction (Oxford & NY: Routledge, 2012).

With the exception of Alexander Welsh’s Dickens Redressed and Stephen J. Spector’s article, which concentrate on Bleak House and Hard Times, all of those mentioned so far are full-length works which discuss several or all of Dickens’s novels. Use the index or the contents page to find their analysis of the novel(s) you are studying, then read that part of the work, followed by the concluding chapter.

Anthologies of critical essays and articles are a good way to sample the critics. You can then go on to read the full-length books written by those critics whose ideas and approaches you find stimulating. Stephen J. Spector’s article that we summarised, appears in Modern Critical Views: Charles Dickens, edited by Harold Bloom (Chelsea House Publishers, NY & Philadelphia, 1987). Also compiled and edited by Harold Bloom is Charles Dickens’s Bleak House in Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations (Chelsea House, NY and Philadelphia, 1987). There are also The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens, edited by John O. Jordan (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001) and Charles Dickens: Bleak House (New Casebook), edited by Jeremy Tambling (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and NY, 1998); and David Copperfield and Hard Times: Charles Dickens (New Casebook), edited by John Peck (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and NY, 1995).

This chapter is intended to act as a bridge towards further study. Numerous articles, essays and books on Dickens are published each year. Most of the books mentioned here also contain bibliographies, or a list of works referred to, so each one can help you to follow up your interests in the critical literature. Finally, remember that your own responses and ideas are as valid as those of any critic; test them first of all against the text you are studying, then look at the critics as a way of further refining your own response to Dickens.