The Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Dickens

The Bedside Dickens provides a lively look at this great novelist's life and career. It sheds light on his role as a polemicist and journalist and explores the way his work was long informed by his Christian faith. It also reveals his most persistent literary themes and provides a vivid sense of how, among his contemporaries, Dickens' vast success-and his "radical" politics-provoked both admiration and scorn. Dickens, this study reminds us, saw life as a battle, but as both a novelist and journalist he sought to provide a more hopeful worldview. He repeatedly satirized vice and folly, even as he urged his readers and the leaders of his day to be less selfish and narrow and to "do good always." Chapters and topics include: Dickens and Animals; Christmas Stories; The Magnetizer; Dickens vs. Thackeray; A Christian Writer; Dickens Down Under; What Dickens Read; Dickens and Spontaneous Combustion; Dickens and Journalism; Dickens on the Couch.

Brian Murray is professor at Loyola University Maryland and author of H.G. Wells, Charles Dickens, and The Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Dickens. Murray has also been an advisor and contributor to the Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century and the Continuum Encyclopedia of British Literature. His essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in a variety of publications, including The Baltimore Sun, First Things, The Weekly Standard, Studies in Short Fiction, and the Washington Times.

Part 1 - The Inimitable Icon "Life with Father" What Gets Blacked in a Blacking Factory? Dickens's Bookshelf Sidebar: Dickens's Favourite Books From the Gallery - Dickens's work as a Parliamentary reporter Sidebar: A Short Look at Shorthand "I'll Never Stop Saying Maria"--rejection by Maria Beadnell Capsule: Sketches by Boz (1836) The Boz Style Capsule: The Pickwick Papers (1836) Men with Pens: Dickens's Illustrators Part 2 continues a Virtual Walking Tour to places associated with Dickens's life and work Includes Capsules on Life and Adventures of Nichloas Nickleby (1830), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840), Barnaby Rudge (1841) "Who Was Gordon and Why Did He Riot?" anti-Catholicism in Dickens's Day Capsule: Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) Sidebar: A Dickens's Crossword Puzzle Part 3 continues the Walking Tour adn includes Capsules of David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, et al. Sidebar: Dickens and W. C. Fields Sidebar: Dickens in Nighttown Was Dickens a Liberal or a Conservative? Sidebar: Dickens on Film "Diagnosis Exhaustion" A look at the medical reasons for Dickens's death at the relatively early age of 58 Dickens's Literary Descendents (This is a truncated description, leaving much out, but providing a good sense of this book.)