His waif-like hero may be a little passive for modern tastes, but Oliver’s adventures with Fagin and the Artful Dodger quickly passed from fiction into folklore.
On the run after a scuffle with another of the undertaker’s apprentices, Oliver Twist meets Jack Dawkins, or the Artful Dodger, who brings him into a gang of pickpockets trained by a criminal named Fagin.įrom Douglas-Fairhurst: “Please, sir, I want some more”-When Dickens wrote that at the start of his first fully planned novel, he was probably hoping that the sentiment would be echoed by his readers. When orphan Oliver Twist loses a bet and brazenly asks for more gruel, he is kicked out of his workhouse and sent to serve as an apprentice to an undertaker. Pickwick and Sam Weller are as immortal as Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello. A huge craze at the time of its original publication in 1836-37-it produced as many commercial spinoffs as any modern film-it still has the power to reduce a reader to tears of laughter. Pickwick’s assistant, adding more comedy to their adventures, which include romances, hunting outings, a costume party and jail stays.įrom Douglas-Fairhurst: This started out as a collection of monthly comic sketches and only slowly developed into something more like a novel.
Sam Weller, a cockney who speaks in proverbs, joins the party as Mr.
In Charles Dickens’ first novel, The Pickwick Papers, Samuel Pickwick, the founder of the Pickwick Club in London, and three of the group’s members-Nathaniel Winkle, Augustus Snodgrass and Tracy Tupman-travel around the English countryside. Here, the book’s author, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, recommends five novels by Dickens and five additional books that offer insight into the writer and his work. He is probably best known for his memorable cast of characters, including Ebenezer Scrooge, Oliver Twist and David Copperfield.īecoming Dickens, a biography released in 2011 in time for the 200th anniversary of his birth, chronicles the writer’s meteoric rise from relative obscurity as a journalist to one of England’s most adored novelists. One of the most-read authors of the Victorian era, Charles Dickens wrote over a dozen novels in his career, as well as short stories, plays and nonfiction.
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