The Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Dickens

The Bedside Dickens provides a lively look at this great novelist's life and career. It sheds light on his role as a polemicist and journalist and explores the way his work was long informed by his Christian faith. It also reveals his most persistent literary themes and provides a vivid sense of how, among his contemporaries, Dickens' vast success-and his "radical" politics-provoked both admiration and scorn. Dickens, this study reminds us, saw life as a battle, but as both a novelist and journalist he sought to provide a more hopeful worldview. He repeatedly satirized vice and folly, even as he urged his readers and the leaders of his day to be less selfish and narrow and to "do good always." Chapters and topics include: Dickens and Animals; Christmas Stories; The Magnetizer; Dickens vs. Thackeray; A Christian Writer; Dickens Down Under; What Dickens Read; Dickens and Spontaneous Combustion; Dickens and Journalism; Dickens on the Couch.

Brian Murray is the author of H.G Wells and Charles Dickens: Literature and Life, and a contributor and adviser to the Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century and The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Literature. His essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in a variety of scholarly and popular publications, including First Things, The Weekly Standard, and The Baltimore Sun.

Part 1 - The Inimitable Icon
"Life with Father"
What Gets Blacked in a Blacking Factory?
Dickens's Bookshelf
Sidebar: Dickens's Favourite Books
From the Gallery - Dickens's work as a Parliamentary reporter
Sidebar: A Short Look at Shorthand
"I'll Never Stop Saying Maria"--rejection by Maria Beadnell
Capsule: Sketches by Boz (1836)
The Boz Style
Capsule: The Pickwick Papers (1836)
Men with Pens: Dickens's Illustrators
Part 2 continues a Virtual Walking Tour to places associated with Dickens's life and work
Includes Capsules on Life and Adventures of Nichloas Nickleby (1830), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840), Barnaby Rudge (1841)
"Who Was Gordon and Why Did He Riot?" anti-Catholicism in Dickens's Day
Capsule: Martin Chuzzlewit (1844)
Sidebar: A Dickens's Crossword Puzzle
Part 3 continues the Walking Tour adn includes Capsules of David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, et al.
Sidebar: Dickens and W. C. Fields
Sidebar: Dickens in Nighttown
Was Dickens a Liberal or a Conservative?
Sidebar: Dickens on Film
"Diagnosis Exhaustion" A look at the medical reasons for Dickens's death at the relatively early age of 58
Dickens's Literary Descendents
(This is a truncated description, leaving much out, but providing a good sense of this book.)