Dickens and Popular Entertainment - Tapa dura

'With its copious details and impeccable documentation, its many quotations from the novelist's speeches and less well-known writings, as well as for the author's fresh and penetrating insights into aspects of Dicken's art, this is a valuable book for the social historian and for the Dicken's enthusiast.' - Mary McGowan, Dickensian

'An important book for Dickensians and cultural historians it is both efficient and persuasive.' - R L Patten, Victorian Studies

'The topic is one of the liveliest in the whole repertory of Dickens studies, and while the other writers have nibbled around its edges, Schlicke is the first to take it on in its entirity.' - R D Altick, Nineteenth-Century Literature

'Dickens and Popular Entertainment is a sound and informative contribution to Dickens scholarship, made more attractive by its twenty-five black-and-white illustrations The book is well produced and was well worth producing.' - Peter Faulkner, Notes and Queries

Dickens and Popular Entertainment is the first extended study of this vital aspect of Dicken's life and work. Ranging widely through showmen's memoirs, playbills, advertisements, journals, drawings and imaginative literature, Paul Schlicke explores the ways in which Dickens channelled his love of entertainment into incomparable artistry. Circus, fair, theatre and street performances provided the novelist with subject matter and with the sources of imaginative stimulus essential to his art. Splendidly illustrated with nineteenth-century engravings, many reprinted here for the first time, this study offers a challenging reassessment of Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop and Hard Times. It shows the important place entertainment held in Dicken's journalism and presents an illuminating perspective on the public readings which dominated the last twelve years of his life.