Charles Dickens
What Mark Twain owed to Charles Dickens
It wasn’t just Dickens’s stage performances and publishing ventures that fascinated Twain, but the witty, journalistic style, which he mimicked to great effect in early travel books
Public lies and secret truths
Smith’s sweeping historical novel spans slavery in Jamaica in the 1770s and the marathon trials of the Tichborne Claimant in London a century later
Dickens’s magic lantern
Admirers of the novels have always enjoyed identifying their settings where possible, but Dickens’s old haunts are now mainly glimpsed in street names or blue plaques
Reworking Dickens
Putting new wine into old wineskins is an increasingly popular fictional mode. Retellings of 19th-century novels abound. Jane Austen inevitably…
His true calling
We tend to think of turning points as single moments of change — Saul on the road to Damascus or…
Ghosts of Christmas pissed
I feel like a prisoner, making daily marks on the cell wall to chart the approach of freedom. But will…
Slow-burning masterpieces
It’s the perfect opportunity to crack open those classics of 19th-century fiction you’ve always been meaning to read, and I…
All the world’s a stage: this election has echoes of Shakespeare and Dickens
The Christmas election has unfolded like a series of mini-dramas from panto, Dickens and other popular classics. Boris has come…
From the archive: the Spectator’s original verdicts on literary classics
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, reviewed 18 December 1847 An attempt to give novelty and interest to fiction, by resorting…
The highs – and occasional lows – of long-distance walking
Long-distance walking is all the rage these days. There are all-nighters staged by charities, for instance the annual MoonWalk in…
Time to update our notions of disability and quit with the pity – and Tiny Tim
Here we go again. Partridges in pear trees. Lovely big Christmas turkey. The Queen’s speech. And then, at some point…
Sweet and sour
Dear, good, kind, sacrificing Little Nell. Here she is kneeling by a wayside pond, bonnet pushed back, shoes and stockings…
Nature beats nurture nearly every time
I’ve been doing some thinking recently about the findings of behavioural geneticists and their implications for education policy. For instance,…
Blown to blazes
Philip Hensher on a little-known episode of first world war history when a munitions factory in Kent exploded in April 1916, claiming over 100 lives
Wait until dark
James McConnachie discovers that some of the greatest English writers — Chaucer, Blake, Dickens, Wordsworth, Dr Johnson — drew inspiration and even comfort from walking around London late at night
The ultimate comfort food
During the D-day landings, members of the parachute regiment, finding themselves behind enemy lines at night, needed a way of…
Letter from London
John Lloyd, producer of Blackadder, Spitting Image, QI etc, has boldly picked up where he left off at Cambridge more…
A glass of wine with Dickens
Which is the greatest novel in the English language? Let us review the candidates: Clarissa, Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch, The…
