Dickens the Journalist - by J Drew (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Dickens's career as a journalist spanned four decades, during which he wrote over 350 articles: reports, sketches, reviews, leaders, exposés, satires and reminiscences. This project offers the first critical guide to over a million words of vintage Dickens, which have been much overlooked in continuous assessments and re-assessments of his novels. It provides both a biographical and socio-historical account of the main phases of Dickens's career as a journalist, and a critical assessment of the thematic and stylistic development of his work.

Review Quotes

'An important contribution to Dickens scholarship. This is the first critical study of this important aspect of Dickens's 40-year career... it provides the reader with an immensely useful biographical, historical and social context in which to read the journalism.' - Tribune

'This is the first book to look at Dickens's journalism in the round and it is hard to imagine that it could have been done better...his light touch and gift for a telling phrase make for an engaging and lively book.' - John Bowen, Times Literary Supplement

'Drew does an excellent job of drawing our attention to the strengths, successes and weaknesses of Dickens's journalistic output.' - David Finkelstein, Year's Work in English Studies (2005)

About the Author

JOHN DREW is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Buckingham. He edited, with Michael Slater, the final volume of the Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens's Journalism (2000), and has recently edited Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray (2001). His doctoral thesis was on The Uncommercial Traveller, and he has also published a number of articles and reviews on aspects of Victorian journalism in The Dickensian and Dickens Quarterly.