Charles Dickens
Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘Charles Dickens’
Mr Squeers explains his educational philosophy to his new and bewildered assistant master at Dotheboys Hall in Yorkshire.
Mr Squeers, owner and headmaster of Dotheboys Hall near Greta Bridge in Yorkshire, has (much to the bafflement of Mrs Squeers) hired an assistant master from London, nineteen-year-old Nicholas Nickleby. The moment has now come for the new arrival to familiarise himself with a system of education designed to fit young people for the world of work — chiefly in Dotheboys Hall.
Tom Pinch, who has seen at last what kind of man his apprentice-master Seth Pecksniff is, leaves Salisbury to seek a new life in London.
At the ripe old age of thirty-five, apprentice architect Tom Pinch has at last seen through his devious master Seth Pecksniff and is sitting on the box seat of the London coach, putting Salisbury behind him. And what a coach it is! Not simply a wooden carriage strapped to four horses, but a single organism, a living and breathing microcosm of London’s breathless glamour.
Toby ‘Trotty’ Veck used to love hearing the church bells ring the New Year in, but now the chimes make him feel guilty, and afraid for the world.
It is New Year’s Eve, but old Toby ‘Trotty’ Veck, a hard-up widower, is not celebrating. Alderman Cute has got him so worked up about a sustainable economy, food injustice and industrialisation that Trotty despairs for future generations if things carry on as they are. Even the church bells seem to toll the death knell of Victorian England. But that night, the spirits of the bells rise up to demand an apology.
Piqued by the way French and German literati mocked the English, Charles Dickens urged his compatriots to be the better men.
A production of The Benefit Night at the Carl Theatre in Vienna in March 1850 introduced the character of Lord Pudding, ‘a travelling Englishman.’ His clownish antics stung Charles Dickens into protesting at the stereotypes perpetuated by Continental writers, yet he did not demand punishment. He urged the English to hop on a train, and spread a little entente cordiale.
The offices of the Cheeryble Brothers are humming with excitement over two upcoming weddings, and Tim Linkinwater finds the mood is catching.
Towards the close of Dickens’s ‘Nicholas Nickleby,’ young Frank Cheeryble has proposed to Kate Nickleby, and Kate’s brother Nicholas has proposed to Madeleine Bray. The atmosphere in the offices of the Cheeryble Brothers in London is heady with romance; and that old lion Tim Linkinwater, the company clerk, admits to Miss La Creevy, ‘a young lady of fifty,’ that the mood is infectious.
Charles Dickens explains to the young men of Boston MA what it is that motivates him to write.
In February 1842, Charles Dickens gave a speech in Boston, Massachusetts, before such literary greats as George Bancroft, Washington Allston and Oliver Wendell Holmes. In reply to the Chairman’s toast, Dickens shared with the company of some two hundred guests his thoughts on what drove him to write.