Phases of Dickens - the man, his message - PDF by John Cuming Walters

Phases of Dickens; the man, his message, and his mission

Charles Dickens,

These chapters consist in the main of addresses which I have had the privilege of reading at meetings of the Dickens Fellowship in various parts of the country. This fact explains, and will, I hope, excuse if necessary, their somewhat rhetorical character, and a few unavoidable repetitions where the subjects overlap. In preparing the papers I had in view a series of illustrations of the scope and purpose of Dickens as novelist and essayist, and as a teacher with a moral gospel enforced as much in the story as in the set sermon. 

Of what there is to say of Dickens little has by now been left unsaid, nor are his works in need of exposition, for his message, is explicit and unmistakable. But it cannot be wholly profitless to take a survey of his complete design and to show how, from the most elaborate of his novels to the shortest of his Note journalistic articles, he was consistently carrying out a great campaign. He was the censor of folly, the exposer of abuse, the advocate of reform, the guide to an uplifted and regenerated state. He was in revolt. 

The eighteenth-century traditions were abhorrent to him, and the early nineteenth-century customs left him dissatisfied. He was eager to be rid of the past; he was impatient with the present; he was on fire to usher in a new era of improved opportunity and of increased happiness for his fellow men. His self-assigned task was to break down barriers to progress and to point the way to the goal. I have sought to portray this man, eliciting him from his books and not from biographies.

 I appreciate Dickens the entertainer, who draws us around him by the wizard spell of his stories; Dickens the necromancer, who leads us into the realm of enchantment through fairy gateways yielding to the magic touch; Dickens the familiar friend, who wins our smiles and compels our tears. But it is not with this Dickens I deal, though some of his characteristics are examined and the sources of his power traced.

 Dickens as Influence — as a warrior against evil, as a champion of good, as a guide to the ideal: it is he whose Phases are marked, that his Mission may be comprehended and his Message absorbed.

the book details :

Author: John Cuming Walters

Publication date: 1911

Company: London, Chapman and Hall

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