Customer Reviews

Student Companion to Charles Dickens (Student Companions to Classic Writers)

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If you're assigned to read a Charles Dickens novel for class and you need a lot of help understanding it, this book will be perfect for you! It contains tons of information on most of his works, and it is written specifically for high school and undergraduate college audiences. What it offers better than the Cliffs Notes or Sparks Notes series is probably the way it relates Charles Dickens' works to the society of his times.

Chapter one of this book is basically introduces you to Charles Dickens himself, the important events in his and his family's life, and how those events inspired Charles Dickens to write some of his books. The second chapter gives additional information about what was going on in the literary world, as well as the rest of the world, to help you understand his novels in the context of that era (Victorian England). The rest of the book addresses specific works: Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations, as well as a handful of his early novels and Christmas-themed novels. Each section explains in depth key events, symbols, themes, and other elements of each story, their significance, and how it ties in with what was going on in the real world. The authors have also included commentary on how certain groups of people, e.g. feminists or Marxists, would react to the novels.

If you're looking for something that covers a chapter-by-chapter analysis of a specific book by Charles Dickens, this companion book unfortunately falls short of that, and you should consult the Cliffs Notes or Sparknotes series for that. Still, if you're reading anything by Charles Dickens and you can obtain this book somehow, it is well worth your time.