Short Dickens

“Whatever the word ‘great’ means,” wrote Chesterton, “Dickens was what it means.” In this course we will study five of the shortest of Dickens’s fifteen novels, which appeared serially between 1837 and 1870: Oliver Twist, Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood. We will discuss, in addition, Dickens’s rise to fame, Victorian London, serial publication, sentimentalism, the illustrations to Dickens’s novels, as well as various commercial enterprises based on the mania for Dickens—among them the ill-fated Dickens World in Kent.