A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations (Penguin) - Charles Dickens [443]
Dickens Holiday Resort
Bleak House
Broadstairs
Kent
Broadstairs was Dickens’s favorite holiday retreat, and he returned there most summers until 1851. He stayed in various hotels and houses there, until 1850, when he took the house most closely associated with him; once called Fort House, its name changed to Bleak House after he used it as the setting for his novel. Dickens completed David Copperfield there, and another house suggested Betsy Trotwood’s residence. Both residences now house museums, whose holdings include period furniture, letters, illustrations, and other commemorative items.
Dickens Residence, 1860–70
Gad’s Hill Place
Rochester
Kent
Dickens admired this estate as a child, when he and his father would walk in the countryside. Reputedly his father once told Dickens to work hard and one day he might own such a home (a tale retold in The Uncommercial Traveller). He bought the late 1770s-era brick home in 1856, and spent years converting rooms and building a conservatory. In his study he painted dummy books on a door and some of the walls with amusing titles, such as History of a Short Chancery Suit in nineteen volumes. It was here that he set his personal correspondence—“the accumulated letters and papers of twenty years”—ablaze in a bonfire in his garden. His daughter tried to convince him to save some of them, but he refused. He lived there until his death in 1870.
Dickens’s Grave Site
Poet’s Corner
Westminster Abbey
London SW1P 3PA
Dickens is buried alongside many other great poets and writers (either buried or commemorated) in this corner of Westminster Abbey, which holds a treasure of paintings, stained glass, textiles, sculpture, and other artifacts. Its tombs and memorials comprise the most important collection of monumental sculpture in the United Kingdom.
Web site: www.westminster-abbey.org.
Suggested Further Reading: Victorian Fiction
If you enjoyed Dickens’s Great Expectations, you might also like to read other Victorian novels, many of which have successfully been adapted into films or series for television.
Dickens’s best-selling rival was William Makepeace Thackeray, whose most famous novel is Vanity Fair (1848). Like Dickens, Thackeray also wrote a “novel of education” titled Pendennis (1848–50). Wilkie Collins was Dickens’s close friend and fellow collaborator. He is best known for the sensation fiction The Woman in White (1860), and he was also an early practitioner of the detective novel, as in The Moonstone (1868). Another Victorian sensation novelist, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, a prolific writer and successful magazine editor, scandalized Victorian critics with her sensation novel Lady Audley’s Secret (1862); her Eleanor’s Victory (1863) is another early example of the detective genre.
Charlotte Brontë's novels, like Dickens’s, often portrayed the lives of orphans struggling to adulthood. Jane Eyre (1847) is a classic novel of the Victorian period. Like Great Expectations, Jane Eyre and Villette (1853) are written as first-person narratives. Perhaps the most respected of the Victorian novelists, George Eliot (born Mary Anne Evans; she took a male pen name in order to be taken seriously by critics and publishers) wrote novels intended as serious art. Her Middlemarch (1871–72) is a masterpiece of English realism and psychological insight, and the heroine of The Mill on the Floss (1860), Maggie Tulliver, is still a favorite among readers. A less familiar realist writer is Elizabeth Gaskell, whose Mary Barton (1848), like many of Dickens’s fictions, chronicles the lives of the working-class poor; Cranford (1851), serialized in Dickens’s magazine, Household Words, sensitively chronicled the capricious effects of the economic market on middle-class women.
Another novel about a cash-conscious society, Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875), often is found on lists of the “100 best novels.” The Warden (1855) is the