Charles Dickens

Advantages: Historical accuracy
Disadvantages: No real plot - lots of individual stories

...This excellent fictional account of a group of companions roaming the highways and byeways of England, is very well written. It is a social study of what it was like to be alive in Dickens time, and it is complimented by some great humour. The exploits of the characters as they go through the different places in the story, are very funny and Dickens uses his imagination and wit to full effect. Some passages in the story, such as the voting scene in one of the towns, are classic moments in literature. The historical background to the stories are illuminating, and entertaining at the same time.... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average somewhat helpful

Advantages: A wonderful evocation of the cruelties of Victorian society.
Disadvantages: The length of the novel might put readers with busy lives off.

...Little Dorrit was the most widely read of Dicken's novels during his lifetime, and it is not difficult to understand why. His subtle evocation of a family blighted by debt, and Victorian society's treatment of debtors is punctuated by Dicken's special brand of humour. There are the grotesque Dickensian characters, yes, and these serve to lighten the overall bleakness of the novel's subject matter. However, it is Dicken's mastery of his sociohistorical context that will remain in the reader's imagination for years to come. His female heroine, like many of Dicken's women, is good and generous and has devoted her life to duty. Nevertheless, she demonstrates a strength often lacking in Dicken's other female heroines that lends extra weight to the text's portrayal of London's Marshalsea prison and the lives affected by it. A wonderful... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average somewhat helpful

Advantages: brill!
Disadvantages: none

...Great Expectations by Charles Dickens Great Expectations opens unforgettably in a twilit and overgrown churchyard on the eerie Kent marshes. There the orphan Pip is disturbed to meet an escaped convict, Magwitch, but gives him food, in an encounter that is to haunt both their lives. How Pip receives riches from a mysterious benefactor, snobbishly abandons his friends for London society and “Great Expectations”, and grows through misfortune and suffering to maturity is the theme of one of Dicken’s best-loved novels. In Great Expectations Dicken’s blends gripping drama with penetrating satire to give a compelling story rich in comedy and pathos: he has also created two of his finest, most haunting characters in Pip and Miss Havisham. First serialized in the journal All Year Round in 1861, Great Expectations... Read review

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