England is being blighted by Dickensian levels of illiteracy despite billions of pounds spent on state education, the Government admitted today. The Schools Minister said there were "still shadows of Charles Dickens's world in our own". If Charles Dickens had lived, he would have been 200 today! I always think of Charles Dickens as a […]
Everybody loves Dickens. A few of the hardcore fans even read his books, but most people are content to enjoy the lavish BBC adaptations, denuded of any of that nasty, dense prose that makes them take more than a week to In a speech on reading, Nick Gibb said that despite two centuries of technological […]
At the time of his death, Dickens had made a name for himself not merely as the author of more than 14 novels (The Mystery of Edwin Drood was half done when he was felled by a stroke), but as a magazine editor, playwright, In this, the bicentenary of Dickens' birth, the Rt Rev Peter […]
Bleak House is Dickens' grandest, most virtuosic achievement, but with all that grandeur and virtuosity it still makes me cry for Esther Summerson. The novel is divided into two strands: the story of rich, haughty, reserved Lady Dedlock, He was Charles Dickens, one of the world's greatest storytellers, and most complex characters. Two hundred years […]