#WELLS_HG

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DICKENS, Charles

British novelist (1812-1870)

In his early 20s Dickens worked as a journalist, writing reports of law court proceedings and Parliamentary debates, and short essays on the life and manners of the time (later collected as Sketches by Boz). It was not until the success of his first novel Pickwick Papers, when he was 25, that he made writing a full-time career. He composed large parts of his novels in dialogue, and was proud of his gift for showing character through speech alone; he also gave his minor characters (pot-boys, shop-customers, carters, oystermen, toddlers) turns of speech or physical eccentricities to make them instantly memorable -- another theatrical technique. This character-vividness is matched by a sustained commentary on human nature and society: Dickens consistently savaged the humbug and petty-mindedness of the middle classes who bought his books, and said that human happiness comes not from law, religion, politics or social structures but from gratuitous, individual acts of kindness. In his later books, notably Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend, savagery predominated over sentimentality to an extent rivalled only in Zola.

DAVID COPPERFIELD  (1849) Dickens' own favourite among his novels, this tells the story (in the first person, as if an autobiography) of a boy growing up: his unhappy childhood and adolescence, his first jobs and first loveaffair, and the way he finally transmutes his experience into fiction and becomes a writer. As often in Dickens' books, subsidiary characters seem to steal the show: the grim Murdstones, the optimistic Micawbers, salt-of-the-earth Peggotty, feckless Steerforth and above all the viperish hypocrite Uriah Heep. But the book's chief interest is the developing character of Copperfield himself. Apparently passive, at other people's mercy, he learns and grows by each experience, maturing before our eyes.

Dickens' novels, in order of publication, are Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend and Edwin Drood. His shorter works include A Christmas Carol, A Child's History of England and three collections of articles, Sketches by Boz, American Notes and The Uncommercial Traveller.

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Nicholas Nickleby

Oliver Twist

To David Copperfield : see also pathway

Novels of 'growing up', using a biographical framework to give a picture (documentary, satirical or both at once) of society : Henry Fielding, Tom Jones James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

To Dickens' more savage social novels : Mrs Gaskell, North and South John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath Patrick White, Riders in the Chariot

To his more relaxed tableaux of human life : H.G. Wells, Kipps Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes William Makepeace Thackeray, Pendennis Tobias Smollett , The Adventures of Roderick Random George Gissing, The Nether World

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BENNETT, Arnold

British novelist and non-fiction writer (1867-1931)

Bennett worked as a journalist (he once edited Woman's Own), and then spent eight years in Paris, setting himself up as playwright, novelist and essayist. He was a workaholic, writing hundreds of thousands of words each year, and much of his output was pot boiling. But his best novels and stories, set in the English Midlands (the area he called 'the Five Towns', now Stoke-on-Trent), are masterpieces. They deal in a realistic way with the lives and aspirations of ordinary people (factory hands, shop assistants, housewives), but are full of disarming optimism and fantasy. Bennett's characters have ambitions; they travel, they read, they dream. Apart from the Five Towns novels his best known works are two books originally written as magazineserials: The Card (about a bouncy young man whose japes outrage provincial society but who ends up as mayor) and The Grand Babylon Hotel, a set of linked stories about the guests and staff in a luxury hotel.

THE OLD WIVES' TALE  (1908) The lives of two sisters are contrasted: vivacious Sophia and steady Constance. Sophia feels constricted by life in the Five Towns, falls for a handsome wastrel and elopes with him to Paris, where he deserts her. Constance meanwhile marries a clerk in her father's shop, and settles to a life of bored domesticity. The novel charts the sisters' lives, and includes memorable scenes of the 1870 siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War. Its concluding section unites the sisters, now elderly, and shows, as their lives draw to a close, that those lives were all they had, that neither achieved anything or made any impact on the world.

The Five Towns novels are Anna of the Five Towns, The Old Wives' Tale, Clayhanger, Hilda Lessways, These Twain and The Roll Call. Riceyman Steps, set in London, is grimmer and more Zolaesque. Mr Prohack is an entertainment, a good follow-up to The Card. Of Bennett's many other writings, particularly fascinating are his Journals, discussing such matters as his love of France, the meals he ate, the plays and novels he enjoyed, and above all his phenomenal day-to-day productivity, and how much his work earned per week, per month, per year.

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Clayhanger

Riceyman Steps

Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (is a set of stories about a US small town whose people's feelings and lives echo those of Bennett's characters) Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage J.B. Priestley, Angel Pavement H.G. Wells, Ann Veronica

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Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

(social comedy in Regency England: choosing marriage-partners)

Comedy of Manners

Mary McCarthy, Birds of America  (likeable 1960s young American dismayed by Europe)

H.G. Wells, Kipps  (personable young man makes his way in 1910s London society)

P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters  (problems in idyllic 1920s English country house? Ring for Jeeves ...)

Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers  (marriage and career-machinations in 19th-century English cathedral city)

Romance

Catherine Cookson, The Parson"s Daughter  (spirited girl "tames" philandering husband in 19th-century English town)

Colleen McCullough, The Thorn Birds  (Australian outback: will hero put priestly vocation before earthly love?)

Georgette Heyer, Regency Buck  (England, 1810s: dislike turns to love in Regency high society; will he tame her or will she tame him?)

Baroness Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel  (languid English milord is really romantic hero of French revolution)

Stylish, Beady-Eyed Satire

Barbara Pym, A Glass of Blessings  (gossip and foolishness in 1950s London high Anglican parish)

Mrs Gaskell, Cranford  (gossip and intrigue in small 1830s English town)

Robertson Davies, A Mixture of Frailties  (intrigue and the arts in small 1950s Canadian town)

Alison Lurie, Foreign Affairs  (Americans in 1970s Englan cling to each other for comfort and affection)

"Taming" or "Being Tamed"

Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career  (young Australian, 1910s, preys on follies of European bourgeoisie)

Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country  (social comedy, New York 1910s: young people prey on foolish elders)

William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair  (social comedy; girls conforming with or rebelling against society)

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David Copperfield

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

(dark childhood, miserable growing-up and eventual happiness in 19th-century London)

"Dickensian" Novels: Bleak Side of Life (the battle for existence fought - and lost)

Victor Hugo, Les Miserables  (1820s France: honest man convicted to gallets escapes and rebuilds his life)

Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset  (1860s England: honest man wrongly accused of theft; student making his way in London)

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth  (1880s New York heiress rejects ways of society to "be herself")

James Baldwin, Go, Tell It on the Mountain  (1950s Harlem: son of slum family learns about sex, racism and born-again Christian love)

John O"Hara, The Lockwood Concern  (1930s Pennsylvania family becomes wealthy by violence, destroys itself)

J.B. Priestley, Angel Pavement  (1920s London firm taken over, developed and ruined by confidence-trickster)

"Dickensian" Novels: Cheerful Side of Life (life maybe a struggle, but it can still be fun)

David Cook, Sunrising  (1830s England: three children rescued from degradation in rural and urban slums)

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  (1860s Mississippi: boy"s adolescence on river and in riverside communities)

H.G. Wells, The History of Mr Polly  (1890s England: middle-aged "drop-out" has many adventures, finds happiness)

Thomas Mann, The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man  (1900s Europe: confidence-man"s cheerful, amoral adventures among the bourgeoisie)

Angus Wilson, The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot  (1950s widow travels world I search of happiness)

Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March  (1930s Chicago: zestful account of slum boy using his wits to make his way)

Learning How to Be Grown-up (adolescence as a quest, with adulthood as the glittering prize)

W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage  (1890s London school days, Paris student life and eventual happiness of lonely young man)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister  (1790s Europe: young man runs away to be an actor, esperiences real life, "finds" himself)

André Gide, The Counterfeiters  (1920s Paris: young people growing up, initiated into life and love)

Lisa Alther, Kinflicks  (1960s USA: young woman learns about sex, love, feminism, protest-politics and "dropping out")

Mordechai Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz  (1930s Montreal: young man moves from rags to riches, loses his soul)

William Makepeace Thackeray, Pendennis  (1840s London: after many escapades, young man finds literary success)