The Cambridge Introduction to Charles Dickens

Description

Charles Dickens became immensely popular early on in his career as a novelist, and his appeal continues to grow with new editions prompted by recent television and film adaptations, as well as large numbers of students studying the Victorian novel. This lively and accessible introduction to Dickens focuses on the extraordinary diversity of his writing. Jon Mee discusses Dickens's novels, journalism and public performances, the historical contexts and his influence on other writers. In the process, five major themes emerge: Dickens the entertainer; Dickens and language; Dickens and London; Dickens, gender, and domesticity; and the question of adaptation, including Dickens's adaptations of his own work. These interrelated concerns allow readers to start making their own new connections between his famous and less widely read works and to appreciate fully the sheer imaginative richness of his writing, which particularly evokes the dizzying expansion of nineteenth-century London.

Jon Mee was educated at Newcastle University and the University of Cambridge. After a Junior Research Fellowship at Jesus College, Oxford, he took up his first permanent position at the Australian National University. He returned to the University of Oxford to take up the Margaret Candfield Fellowship in English at University College and a post in the Oxford English Faculty. He moved to the University of Warwick in 2007 and then took his current position as Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of York in October 2013.