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This study considers manifestations of Christmas in Dickens's work and explores how death, time, change, charity, love, and religious belief provide a fresh basis on which to assess how Dickens conceived of Christmas and New Year.
List of contents
- Prologue
- 1: A Frequent Visitor
- 2: Dickens's Christmases to 1836
- 3: Pickwick and After
- 4: Dickens Contemplates Sledge-Hammer Blows
- 5: Yuletide Celebrations in the 1840s
- 6: Marley Was Dead
- 7: Ringing Out Change
- 8: Chirping
- 9: Battling for His Life
- 10: Bargain Haunters
- 11: Thereafter
- 12: Endings
- Appendix I: Dickens's Essays
- Appendix II: Dickens and Unitarianism
- Appendix III: Dickens on Victorian religious disputes
- Bibliography
About the author
Robert L. Patten retired as Autrey Professor Emeritus in Humanities and Emeritus Professor of English at Rice University; he continues as a Senior Research Fellow, non-resident, at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Studies, University of London. He earned his B.A. at Swarthmore and his PhD at Princeton and has devoted his research and teaching primarily to British nineteenth-century literature, book illustration, and print history. For these subjects he has received Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, and other grants, and spent a year each at the National Humanities Center and the National Gallery of Art.
Summary
This study considers manifestations of Christmas in Dickens's work and explores how death, time, change, charity, love, and religious belief provide a fresh basis on which to assess how Dickens conceived of Christmas and New Year.
Additional text
In this beautifully illustrated, richly contextualized study, Robert Patten traces the often surprising and deeply-rooted connections between death and Christmas festivities in Dickens's Christmas books and in his own experiences of the winter solstice holidays.
