Selected Journalism: 1850-1870 (Penguin Classics) - Softcover

Dickens, Charles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140435808 ISBN 13: 9780140435801

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1998

Synopsis

A testament to the energy and creativity of a writer and journalist without equal

Throughout his writing career Charles Dickens was a hugely prolific journalist. This volume of his later work is selected from pieces that he wrote after he founded the journal Household Words in 1850, up until his death in 1870. Here subjects as varied as his nocturnal walks around London slums, prisons, theatres and Inns of Court, journeys to the continent and his childhood in Kent and London are captured in remarkable pieces such as 'Night Walks', 'On Strike', 'New Year's Day' and 'Lying Awake'. Aiming to catch the imagination of a public besieged by hack journalism, these writings are an extraordinary blend of public and private, news and recollection, reality and fantastic description. David Pascoe's introduction traces the development of Dickens's career as a journalist and examines his fusion of real events with flights of fancy. This edition also includes explanatory notes, a bibliography and a Dickens chronology.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

About this title

About the Author:

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Landport, Portsea, England. He died in Kent on June 9, 1870. The second of eight children of a family continually plagued by debt, the young Dickens came to know not only hunger and privation,but also the horror of the infamous debtors’ prison and the evils of child labor. A turn of fortune in the shape of a legacy brought release from the nightmare of prison and “slave” factories and afforded Dickens the opportunity of two years’ formal schooling at Wellington House Academy. He worked as an attorney’s clerk and newspaper reporter until his Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Pickwick Papers (1837) brought him the amazing and instant success that was to be his for the remainder of his life. In later years, the pressure of serial writing, editorial duties, lectures, and social commitments led to his separation from Catherine Hogarth after twenty-three years of marriage. It also hastened his death at the age of fifty-eight, when he was characteristically engaged in a multitude of work.

David Pascoe is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. He has also edited Thackeray's The Newcomers for Penguin Classics.

Review:

Those of us who, unconsciously, perhaps, think of Charles Dickens as more a phenomenon than a man may take special delight in his Selected Journalism for on every page his sense of himself as a particular man in a particular place and time is apparent in every sentence, and yet that ineffable other thing is there as well, that abiding inexhaustibility, that transcendent mastery of all the richnesses of the English language. -- The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Jane Smiley

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0140435808
• ISBN 13: 9780140435801
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 648
• Editor: Pascoe David