This book is about a man named Mr.Pickwick.Mr.Pickwick is not a rich man but he still goes on in life.What Mr.Pickwick does is he trys to help out his friends.He is a man not a kid like some may think.The book is trying to create a positively good man.He works in a newspaer publishing place with very little pay.This book is about never giving up.

Early Dickens has alays been my favorite, and John Bowen's book is an excellent companion to those wildly energetic first novels. The exciting and thought provoking chapter on Oliver Twist alone is worth the price of the book and will send you back to re-read the novel with a greater appreciation of Dickens' genius.

This edition of Dickens' Great Expectations is considered one of, if not THE scholarly edition now in print. It contains a cogent introduction to the novel and an exhaustive appendix. Although the price will keep many, if not all, from purchasing the book it is definetly look for from a library--looking in a university's library is probably the best bet for finding a copy.

This is a book I first checked out from the library in college. I must tell you, for anyone who wants to become a writer, this is the most fascinating book. After I read this baby at least five times, and the University of Iowa library was screaming to get it back, I must have checked it out at least 4 more times. Now that I can, I have my own copy. This book will explain to you--from the inside--how Charles Dickens planned and constructed his novels. Remember the famous Hemingway quote: "Fiction is architecture, not interior decorating." This book contains the blueprints for dozens of now-famous novels. curmudgeon99@earthlink.net

Suchoff bases his far-ranging analysis of three major novelists of modernity - Dickens, Melville, and Kafka - on the stimulating intellectual frame inspired by the now classic Frankfurt School theorists - Adorno, Horkheimer, and Benjamin - and by their interpretation of history, which goes back to the first half of the twentieth century. Against the anti-historical reading of culture, the Frankfurt School claimed that artefacts contained the traces of their dialectical links with their times and that art worked against the grain of hegemonic representations, thus carrying out an essentially redemptive role in the domain of culture. According to Suchoff, this approach can still offer innovative and meaningful interpretations of the modern novel, capable of highlighting the oppositional role played by mass culture in and through texts, in the face of what he regards as reductive and conservative readings of modernism. Starting with Victorianism, Suchoff then discusses how the commodification of the novelist does not suppress Dickens's subversive rewriting of Victorian stereotypes. He concentrates on "Little Dorrit" to retrace in the subtext of this emblematic and most decent novel a repressed narrative of sexual abuse and unspeakable violence against women, a narrative that is nevertheless voiced by eloquent textual clues. Melville's work is interpreted as a powerful and devastating revision of American myths of power, destined to shipwreck like Ahab's ship, the Pequod. Finally, Kafka is analysed as a writer who thoughtfully comes to terms with Jewish identity, Zionism and political action, against the interpretative cliché that would deny his involvement with the challenges of his times. Suchoff's analysis manages to combine both sound theoretical knowledge and clever textual analysis, capturing the making and remaking of ideology in the discursive layers of the literary artefact. Doubtless, his convincing interpretation of these three major writers, who are so diversely engaged with history, makes his book not just an interesting contribution to the large corpus of criticism on Dickens, Melville and Kafka in the widening field of cultural studies, but a stimulus to apply such critical tools to other texts.

Very humorous. I did much laughing out loud.

I found this in a 2nd hand store (1875; 1st US edition), and it is a complete howl! I like reading old books, but I hadn't read much Dickens. The personality sketches, 2-3 pages each, do help us understand people of that era, and, with a little cultural translating for the norms of the day, I recognized people I know in them today!

I'm sure someone soon will publish this book at an affordable price. It would absolutely sell!

Also included in the book are drawings by (I'm guessing Dickens' pal) Charles Welsh. I believe they are cartoons of their day. They are mildly amusing, but the book wouldn't lose anything without them.

This slender volume is Charles Dickens' written interpertation on the four Gospels. He made the provision that it was not to be published until much later. It is a father's testimony of the truth of the things he held dear. A real treasure.

Recently I had to spend a couple of months camping with my 8 year old daughter away from home and mom. We enjoyed reading and even rereading some of the stories from this book containing Ten children from ten different Dickens tales -- including Tiny Tim, David Copperfield, and Oliver Twist. They are featured in a generously illustrated colorful compendium. While the depictions of the children's lives are true to the originals, abridgement may infact encourage the young reader to read the original when they grow up. My daughter could empathise with homeless,motherless Dickensian kids, however she could not understand what is the big deal about Oliver asking for more if he is still hungry ! This tells us how far we have come in terms of feeding our kids well (if not good homes and both parents) since Dickens, at least in the developed countries. In one sentence this book was a nice trailer to the poignant prose of Dickens to be read aloud as well as read by curious children themselves.

Dickens' Christmas Books might be some of his most overlooked works, except for, of course, "A Christmas Carol." But in these stories he has captured the season's spirits of reflection and faith better than any other work I've read. "A Christmas Carol" is an acknowledged masterpiece; "The Chimes" and "The Battle of Life" are particularly moving as well. Four of these five stories bring me to tears by their ends.

I started in 1991 to read one story per year in the published sequence, (for Christmas 2000, I'm reading The Haunted Man again) and this has made December and its holidays more enjoyable and meaningful for me. I hope to continue the cycle and look forward to reading "this year's Christmas story" aloud to my family as my kids grow up.

Oxford Press/World's Classics publishes excellent quality paperbacks, and they do justice here to Dickens' powerful works. I highly recommend this work (and especially this publisher) to anyone; if you're looking for "A Christmas Carol", get this volume of all the Christmas Stories and enjoy even more of Dickens' masterful ability to weave the human condition into such moving short stories.

This is a sweet coloring book type of activity book for pre-school and early elementary. It included a Bible themed ABC section to color, as well as numbers, colors, and basic shapes. The last part of the book is filled with easy projects to color and cut out for holidays. Most pages have Bible references too.