Charles Dickens: The Complete Novels + A Biography of the Author E-Book

Charles Dickens.

• Herausgeber: Book House Publishing
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

This book contains several HTML tables of contents.The first table of contents (at the very beginning of the ebook) lists the titles of all novels included in this volume. By clicking on one of those titles you will be redirected to the beginning of that work, where you'll find a new TOC that lists all the chapters and sub-chapters of that specific work.Here you will find the complete novels of Charles Dickens in the chronological order of their original publication.- The Pickwick Papers- Oliver Twist- Nicholas Nickleby- The Old Curiosity Shop- Barnaby Rudge- Martin Chuzzlewit- Dombey and Son- David Copperfield- Bleak House- Hard Times- Little Dorrit- A Tale of Two Cities- Great Expectations- Our Mutual Friend- The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Leseprobe

Charles Dickens

THE COMPLETE NOVELS

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Table of Contents

Charles Dickens — An Extensive Biography

The Pickwick Papers

Oliver Twist

Nicholas Nickleby

The Old Curiosity Shop

Barnaby Rudge

Martin Chuzzlewit

Dombey and Son

David Copperfield

Bleak House

Hard Times

Little Dorrit

A Tale of Two Cities

Great Expectations

Our Mutual Friend

The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Charles Dickens — An Extensive Biography

by Belle Moses

Part 1 — The Boy

Chapter 1 — In the Very Beginning

Chapter 2 — The Real David Copperfield

Chapter 3 — The Little Dickenses at Home

Chapter 4 — The First Start in Life

Part 2 — The Young Man

Chapter 5 — The First Sparks of Genius

Chapter 6 — The First Novels and What Came of Them

Chapter 7 — Master Humphrey’s First Tale

Chapter 8 — Dickens and the Historical Novel

Part 3 — The Books That Made the Man

Chapter 9 — Dickens and America

Chapter 10 — The Spirit of Christmas

Chapter 11 — The Girls of Dickenses Day

Chapter 12 — Little Housekeepers in Dickens-Land.

Part 4 — The Man Who Made the Books

Chapter 13 — Dickens, the Many-Sided

Chapter 14 — Dickens and His Friends

Chapter 15 — Dickens at Home

Part 1 — The Boy

Chapter 1 — In the Very Beginning

We all begin pretty much the same way; little red, crumpled bundles of humanity, tightly tucked up in bassinets which we soon outgrow. Some of us kick more than others; some of us crow more than others; some of us cry more than others; but we all hit out aimlessly with our tiny fists, and challenge the world.

In America all men are born equal, but in England this is not so. The majority of English babies come into the world quite humbly (only the favored few look down from the heights), and this was the case with little Charles John Huffam Dickens, who sprang from the great Middle Class, which has produced more great men and women than all the peers and princes of the realm could boast of. We have his own words describing the day and hour of his birth:

“I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday at twelve o’clock at night.” So says little David Copperfield, and everyone knows that Charles Dickens and David Copperfield were doubles. Dickens’s initials were C. D. (he dropped John Huffam as soon as he had a voice in the matter), and David's were D. C., easy-enough to turn round when there is a real boy hiding behind the boy in the book. And it is quite true that Charles Dickens was born at Portsea, on Friday, February 7, 1812 — “Leap Year,” one of his biographers tells us, “at a few minutes before midnight.”

The house in which he was born was like many other houses in Portsea; indeed, it was one of a row and not in any way distinguished from its fellows. Each house had a gabled roof and a dormer window; each had its little garden in the front, separated from its neighbor by a thickly growing hedge. Now, however, having once contained the cradle of Charles Dickens, Number 387, Mile-End Terrace, Portsea, has become quite a famous little residence, one of the landmarks of this shipping center. John Dickens, the father of Charles, was in the employ of the Navy Pay Office, and upon his marriage to Elizabeth Barrow, 1809, was transferred from Somerset House to attend to the paying off of ships at Portsmouth, so the young couple resided at Portsea, near by. Here three of their children were born; Frances Elizabeth — better known as Fanny Dickens — in November, 1810; Charles John Huffam Dickens, in February, 1812, and a third child, Alfred, who died when he was a baby.

The overshadowing name of our small hero was a compliment to his mother’s father — Charles, to his own father — John, and to his godfather — Christopher Huffam, also connected with the Navy; but the simpler name, which the world knows, is the only one by which he was ever called, and gradually the others faded from the minds of all who knew the “small queer boy.”

There were in all eight children in the Dickens family; the three above mentioned who were born in Portsea; then followed Letitia, born in 1816; another daughter, Harriet, who also died when she was a baby; Frederick, born in 1820; Alfred Lamert, born in 1822; and Augustus, in 1827.

The six surviving children were quite enough for one poor man to take care of, and John Dickens lived to prove that he was a poor hand at taking care of anybody. He lent money as freely as he borrowed, and so this good-natured, improvident man was always in hot water, from one cause or the other, and loose pennies did not lie around promiscuously in the Dickens household. Quite early in life the little Dickens children learned to regard pennies with awe and respect.

Charles Dickens’s memory dipped ’way back into his childhood, so far back, indeed, that it seems hard to believe that the baby mind could hold, even for a moment, the impressions he recalls. Yet he tells us that they are not merely the things he had heard, but what he had seen with his baby eyes, and thought out in that wondering baby brain of his, which began its active work at a time when most babies suck their thumbs and stare into vacancy.

His first impression of himself is very vivid; a laughing, golden-haired baby boy, taking his first steps from his mother to his nurse.

“I believe I can remember those two at a little distance apart, dwarfed to my sight by stooping down or kneeling on the floor, and I — going unsteadily from one to the other.” [This was little David Copperfield’s experience.] And he adds:

“This may be fancy, though I think the memory of most of us can go farther back into such times than many of us suppose.” He has a further memory of a pigeon-house on a pole in the center of their back yard, without any pigeons in it, and of a dog-kennel in the corner — without any dog.

He remembered also a long passage — terribly long it seemed to his childish eyes — leading from the kitchen to the front door, with a dreadful dark closet on one side, where provisions were stored for family use. There were tubs and jars and tea-chests in this room, behind which any unknown terrors might hide and jump out on one, so the small boy with the big imagination ran past it at night, fear lending wings to his feet.

This was not the little house at Portsea which Dickens has described so vividly as the first residence of David Copperfield; they moved to another before little Charles was out of his nurse’s arms, still in Portsea, though slightly over the boundaryline; and in 1816, when the boy was four years old, John Dickens moved his family to Chatham. In their new home, Number 2, Ordnance Terrace, where they lived for five years, were passed the only happy hours of childhood the “small queer boy” was ever to know.

There were only three children in the Dickens family when they moved to Chatham: Fanny, Charles, and little Letitia Mary — a very pretty, dainty little girl. Ordnance Terrace was a row of houses very much on the order of the row of houses in Mile-End Terrace, Portsea, but a little roomier, and even more highly respectable from the front. There were lots of interesting folk in Ordnance Terrace, interesting, that is, from the small boy’s point of view, for this observing youngster of four tucked away beneath his curly pate impressions enough to pervade his books in after years.

On the corner resided his first sweetheart, little Lucy Stroughill, a golden-haired Lucy, whose birthday he was on several occasions invited to celebrate. Here is his own description:

“I can very well remember being taken out to visit some peach-faced creature in a blue sash, and shoes to correspond, whose life I supposed to consist entirely of birthdays. Upon seed-cake, sweet 2 wine, and shining presents, that glorified young person seemed to me to be exclusively reared. At so early a stage of my travels did I assist at the anniversary of her nativity (and became enamored of her) [he means that he went to her birthday party and fell in love with her] that I had not yet acquired the recondite knowledge that a birthday is the common property of all who are born, but supposed it to be a special gift bestowed by the favoring heavens on that one distinguished infant. There was no other company, and we sat in a shady bower, under a table, as my better (or worse) knowledge leads me to believe, and were regaled with saccharine [sugary] substances and liquids, until it was time to part.”

This is a child’s unfailing idea of a party; just something to eat, and a nice snug place to eat it in, and the fewer people there — why, the more one can eat, of course; but in addition to this, we must not forget that Master Charles was deeply in love with the golden curls and the blue sash with the shoes to match, and so the feast was a “love-feast” flavored with “seed-cake and sweet wine.” The brother of his divinity, George Stroughill, a bright, handsome, manly and somewhat daring boy, was a few years older than the small Charles, who admired him immensely, with very much the same love that had for Indeed, it is pretty certain that Dickens had this early friend in mind when he created the character of the handsome, reckless schoolboy.