Single Author: Charles Dickens

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Charles Dickens is the most important English novelist. His works both reflected and shaped the nineteenth century world from which they emerged. Growing exponentially in population across the nineteenth century, London became the biggest city in the history of the world, and its centre of commerce, finance, and power. Dickens is incomparably the greatest writer of London. Although he might be primarily be viewed as a social novelist, whose works take aim at a variety of establishment institutions, from the law to banks, the penal system and education, Dickens is also the creator of some of English literature's most memorable characters, like Ebenezer Scrooge, Oliver Twist, or Miss Havisham. As a journalist, as well as a novelist, Dickens both imagines and criticizes his world. He is fundamental to any study of English literature. In this module, we will read a range of his works from journalistic essays to the longer novels, and look at some of the ways in which his books have been adapted.