Dickens' Fur Coat and Charlotte's Unanswered Letters: The Rows and Romances of England's Great Victorian Novelists - Softcover

Pool, Daniel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 006098435X ISBN 13: 9780060984359

Publisher: PerfectBound, 1998

Synopsis

Explores the publicity stunts, rivalries, rows, and mayhem perpetrated by famous Victorian authors

About this title

Review:

With publishing empires swallowing smaller house for breakfast and agents swiping authors left, right, and center, the modern book industry might seem an insider's paradise, an aspiring author's nightmare, a reader's Goldberg contraption. Alas, according to Daniel Pool, 'twas ever thus. Money, advertising, publicity, blurbs, and the author's charisma were just as central to Victorian bookselling as they are now. Focusing particularly on Dickens, Charlotte Brontė, George Eliot, and Thackeray, the author builds up a portrait of cutthroat times and cutthroat measures. Readers will be particularly taken with the author's account of the rise of the serial novel--and Dickens's frustration with the form. (Something Flaubert quickly copped to. After finishing The Pickwick Papers, he commented to George Sand, "Some bits are magnificent, but what a defective structure.") And the quotations Daniel Pool presents, from the epigraphs to Virginia Woolf's assessment on the final page, make Dickens' Fur Coat essential social history.

About the Author:

Daniel Pool is the author of What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew, and Christmas in New York. He lives in New York City.

About this edition

• Publisher: PerfectBound
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 006098435X
• ISBN 13: 9780060984359
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 300