A01=Catherine Waters
A01=Peter Merchant
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Amy Dorrit
Author_Catherine Waters
Author_Peter Merchant
automatic-update
bleak
Bleak House
British Library Additional Manuscripts
Broken Shaft
Captain Cuttle
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DS
Category=DSB
Category=DSBF
Category=DSK
Category=HBTB
Category=NHTB
charles
Child Sweeps
childhood studies
christmas
Christmas Books
COP=United Kingdom
copperfield
david
David Copperfield
Delivery_Pre-order
Dent Uniform Edition
Dickensian Child
Dullborough Town
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Fairy Tales
Gad's Hill
Gad’s Hill
house
Lady Dedlock
Language_English
literary typology
Mr Creakle's School
Mr Creakle’s School
Mr Dombey
narrative memory
nicholas
nickleby
Nina Burgis
nineteenth-century fiction
oliver
Oliver Twist
PA=Temporarily unavailable
Pantomime Clown
Paul Schlicke
Price_€100 and above
PS=Active
reading practices
representations of childhood in Dickens novels
Salem House
softlaunch
Sol Gills
Sutherland House
twist
Uncommercial Traveller
Victorian literature
Young Men
Product details
- ISBN 9781472423818
- Weight: 740g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 28 Jan 2015
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
The figure of the child and the imaginative and emotional capacities associated with children have always been sites of lively contestation for readers and critics of Dickens. In Dickens and the Imagined Child, leading scholars explore the function of the child and childhood within Dickens’s imagination and reflect on the cultural resonance of his engagement with this topic. Part I of the collection examines the Dickensian child as both characteristic type and particular example, proposing a typology of the Dickensian child that is followed by discussions of specific children in Oliver Twist, Dombey and Son, and Bleak House. Part II focuses on the relationship between childhood and memory, by examining the various ways in which the child’s-eye view was reabsorbed into Dickens’s mature sensibility. The essays in Part III focus upon reading and writing as particularly significant aspects of childhood experience; from Dickens’s childhood reading of tales of adventure, they move to discussion of the child readers in his novels and finally to a consideration of his own early writings alongside those that his children contributed to the Gad’s Hill Gazette. The collection therefore builds a picture of the remembered experiences of childhood being realised anew, both by Dickens and through his inspiring example, in the imaginative creations that they came to inform. While the protagonist of David Copperfield-that 'favourite child' among Dickens’s novels-comes to think of his childhood self as something which he 'left behind upon the road of life', for Dickens himself, leafing continually through his own back pages, there can be no putting away of childish things.
Peter Merchant is Principal Lecturer in English at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK, and Catherine Waters is Professor of Victorian Literature and Print Culture at the University of Kent, UK, and an Honorary Affiliate of the University of Sydney, Australia.
