Dickens

You are in the world of Charles Dickens. A man who took the pulse of a nation in his heart and turned the ink of his own tragedy into the gold of immortality.

The life of Charles Dickens is a story as captivating as any of his well-known books, which begins in the dark of a rat-infested blacking factory and ends in the glare of international stardom. In Dickens: The Life, Times, And Enduring Magic of a Great Storyteller, the author Hamon de Quillan takes the reader on a tour of the Victorian era and the deeper connexion between the life of the man and the literary giant that Dickens became.

The book is not merely a biography but a study of the spirit of Dickens. Learn how a boyhood of fatherly debt and factory oppression shaped the sympathetic worldview that gave birth to such great figures as Oliver Twist, Little Nell and Ebenezer Scrooge. De Quillan skilfully cuts through the mazes of the personal life of Dickens, his marriage to Catharine Hogarth, his secret affair with Ellen Ternan, and his unstoppable struggle with the burdens of fame.

De Quillan looks with the critical vision of a scholar and the narrative skill of a biographer at how Dickens transformed the publishing industry by serialisation, how he used his voice to support social reform and how he created the modern Christmas. This book is a revelation of the transformational quality of literature to those who are either lifelong devotees or new readers just starting their own journey into the Victorian underworld.

See how a master storyteller transformed personal suffering to be a universal inheritance so that his storeys are as bright and living now as they were at the beginning of the 19th century. Dickens: The Life, Times, And Magic of a Great Storyteller is a tribute to the human soul that could not be defeated and magic that could be eternal in a man who could change the world with a pen.