Charles Dickens in Love

Availability:
Ebook in PDF format. Available for immediate download after we receive your order

DRM:
Watermark

Publication Year:
2013

ISBN-13: 9781480419728

<DIV><DIV><DIV>In celebration of the bicentennial of Charles Dickens&rsquo;s birth, here is Dickens as you have never seen him before: an intimate and engaging portrait of the great author and the women he loved.<BR><BR>&ldquo;To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where</div><DIV>I have opened my heart.&rdquo; &mdash;Charles Dickens</div><BR>When Charles Dickens died in 1870 he was the best-known man in the English-speaking world&mdash;the preeminent&#160;Victorian celebrity, universally mourned as both a noble spirit and the greatest of novelists. Yet&#160;when the first person named in his will turned out to be an unknown woman named Ellen Ternan, only a&#160;handful of people had any idea who she was. Of his romance with Ellen, Dickens had written, &ldquo;it belongs&#160;to my life and probably will only die out of the same with the proprietor,&rdquo; and so it was&mdash;until his death she&#160;remained the most important person in his life.</div><DIV><BR>She was not the first woman who had fired his imagination. As a young man he had fallen deeply in love&#160;with a woman who &ldquo;pervaded every chink and crevice&rdquo; of his mind for three years, Maria Beadnell, and&#160;when she eventually jilted him he vowed that &ldquo;I never can love any human creature but yourself.&rdquo; A few&#160;years later he was stunned by the sudden death of his young sister-in-law, Mary Scott Hogarth, and worshiped&#160;her memory for the rest of his life. &ldquo;I solemnly believe that so perfect a creature never breathed,&rdquo; he&#160;declared, and when he died over thirty years later he was still wearing her ring.</div><DIV><BR>Charles Dickens has no rival as the most fertile creative imagination since William Shakespeare, and no&#160;one influenced his imagination more powerfully than these three women, his muses and teachers in the&#160;school of love. Using hundreds of primary sources, Charles Dickens in Love narrates the story of the most&#160;intense romances of Dickens&rsquo;s life and shows how his novels both testify to his own strongest affections and&#160;serve as memorials to the young women he loved all too well, if not always wisely.&#160;</div></div>