An Intelligent Person's Guide to Dickens

Dickens is one of the greatest literary icons of British culture, an apparently inexhaustible resource for the entertainment industry. This book provides a personal insight into the truth of a famous tribute paid to Dickens the man by a helper on his triumphal public reading tours: "The more you want out of the Master, the more you'll find in him". Ranging widely over Dickens' fiction, journalism, letters and speeches, this book sets out to capture the leading ideas and beliefs, the artistic ideals and ambitions, that inspired and shaped Dickens' prodigious output, offering a guide to 'Dickensian values'.