Book description
In this extensive study of Dickens’ childhood and youth, Hibbert sets down all that is known of those early years…over and above the blacking factory and the school we all know. In revealing how Dickens transferred the smallest fragments of his experience to his fiction, how he interpreted his youth to his readers and himself, and how those crucial years affected him as a writer and as a man, Hibbert throws a clear light on the creative process and the sources of literary imagination. His book illuminates a complex and baffling man without at any point suggesting that his writing and his actions explain his inner life entirely. Tracing Dickens through his thirty-third year, an epilogue completes the story of his life. Hibbert writes with skill and wit, entertaining and instructing in equal measure.
CONTENTS:
1. The Better World
2. Warren’s Blacking
3. Wellington House Academy
4. Messrs Ellis and Blackmore
5. Miss Maria Beadnell
6. The Chronicle Reporter
7. Miss Catherine Hogarth
8. The Inimitable Boz
9. Miss Mary Hogarth
10. The Novelist Triumphant
11. Mrs Charles Dickens
