Charles Dickens
The tumultuous life of England's greatest novelist, beautifully rendered by unparalleled literary biographer Claire Tomalin. When Charles Dickens died in 1870, The Timesof London successfully campaigned for his burial in Westminster Abbey, the final resting place of England's kings and heroes. Thousands flocked to mourn the best recognized and loved man of nineteenth-century England. His books had made them laugh, shown them the squalor and greed of English life, and also the power of personal virtue and the strength of ordinary people. In his last years Dickens drew adoring crowds to his public appearances, had met presidents and princes, and had amassed a fortune. Like a hero from his novels, Dickens trod a hard path to greatness. Born into a modest middle-class family, his young life was overturned when his profligate father was sent to debtors' prison and Dickens was forced into harsh and humiliating factory work. Yet through these early setbacks he developed his remarkable eye for all that was absurd, tragic, and redemptive in London life. He set out to succeed, and with extraordinary speed and energy made himself into the greatest English novelist of the century.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
22mentions
21people
2009–2025years
14% recommend86% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Either David Copperfield by Charles Dickens or Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. Both are very long novels that get better and better with every page.
- Jared Diamond - "Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed" (non-fiction)
Iván Repila - "The Boy Who Stole Attila’s Horse": short intense novel about 2 boys who are trapped in a well
Margaret Atwood - "The handmaid's tale"
Khaled Hosseini - "The kite runner"
Agatha Christie - "The murder of Roger Ackroyd" (very surprising plot)
Andy Weir - "The Martian"
Charles Dickens - "David Copperfield"
Clare Mackintosh - "I let you go"
Carlos Ruiz Zafón - "The Shadow of the Wind"
M.R. Carey - "The girl with all the gifts"
- 32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
- What an great article and what a great life. I had no idea.
When he was 11, his father died and Andersen took a job in a factory where he had his trousers pulled down to prove he was a man.
Aged 14, he left [...] to make his fortune in Copenhagen. “First you go through an awful lot, and then you become famous,” he explained to his anxious mother, as though the plot of his life had been written already.
“I shall have no success with my appearance,” he reflected, “so I make use of whatever is available.”
If he sounds like a character invented by Charles Dickens, it is because Uriah Heep was modelled on Andersen, whom Dickens met in 1847. David Copperfield’s first sighting of Heep was “a cadaverous face” peering out of the round tower: “He had a way of writhing when he wanted to express enthusiasm, which was very ugly, the snaky twistings of his throat and body.” “If you’re an eel, sir,” counsels Betsey Trotwood, “conduct yourself like one. If you’re a man, control your limbs, sir!” In our own kinder age, we might diagnose Anderson with dyspraxia.
He saw himself, however, not as an earthly being at all but “one who seemed”, as he told Dickens, “to have fallen from the skies”.
- Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. — Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
Good old Chucky D. was a financial guru before it was cool.
- “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery”
― Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/90487-annual-income-twenty-...
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