Name	Amos Rusie
Position	Pitcher
Alt	A baseball player is seen from his chest up, facing slightly left of the camera.
Birth date	May 30, 1871
Birth place	Mooresville, Indiana
Death date	December 06, 1942
Death place	Seattle, Washington
Bats	Right
Throws	Right
Debutdate	May 9
Debutyear	1889
Debutteam	Indianapolis Hoosiers
Finaldate	June 9
Finalyear	1901
Finalteam	Cincinnati Reds
Stat1label	Win-Loss record
Stat1value	245–174
Stat2label	Earned run average
Stat2value	3.07
Stat3label	Strikeouts
Stat3value	1934
Teams	Indianapolis Hoosiers () New York Giants (–) Cincinnati Reds ()
Highlights	National League Pitching Triple Crown: 1894 National League ERA champion: 1894, 1897 National League wins champion: 1894 National League strikeout champion: 1890-1891, 1893-1895 4-time National League shutout leader 2-time National League complete game leader 8 20-win seasons 4 30-win seasons 5 200-strikeout seasons 2 300-strikeout seasons
Hofdate
Hofmethod	Veteran's Committee }}

Amos Wilson Rusie (May 30, 1871 – December 6, 1942), nicknamed "The Hoosier Thunderbolt", was an American right-handed pitcher in Major League Baseball during the late 19th century. He had a 10-season career in the National League (NL), which consisted of one season with the Indianapolis Hoosiers in , eight with the New York Giants from to , and one with the Cincinnati Reds in .

He is best known for the speed in which he pitched a baseball. The velocity of his fastball was unknown, but it has been estimated that he threw it in the mid to upper 90s. He led the league in strikeouts five times, and won 20 or more games eight times. Though he did throw hard, he did not have good control of pitches, leading the league in walks five times, is seventh all-time among the career pitching leaders in that category, and in 1890 he walked 289, the all-time single-season record.

One of his fastballs struck future Hall of Fame Hughie Jennings in the head rendering him comatose for a period of four days before recovering. This incident was a catalyst for officials to change the distance from the pitching rubber to home plate from to the current , 6 inches. This ruling was made effective for the season, right at the peak of Amos Rusie’s pitching prowess. The distance change did not hinder Rusie's effectiveness, leading the league in strikeouts three straight seasons afterward, while also winning what later would be known as the pitching triple crown in . For his accomplishments, he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1977 by the Veterans Committee.

Early life

Rusie was born on May 30, 1871 in Mooresville, Indiana, to mason and plasterer William Asbury Rusie and his wife Mary Donovan. When he was still young, his family moved to nearby Indianapolis, Indiana, where he eventually quit school to work in a factory. It was during this time, when he was playing for a Semi-professional Indianapolis baseball team named the "Sturm Avenue Never Sweats," that scouts first took notice of the speed with which he threw a baseball, and his effectiveness as a pitcher when he shutout touring National League baseball teams, the Boston Beaneaters and the Washington Senators.

In , at the age of 18, Rusie signed with the Burlington Babies of the Central Interstate League. However, he signed shortly thereafter by the Indianapolis Hoosiers of the NL, and made his major league debut on May 9 in a 2–13 loss to the Cleveland Blues, pitching in relief of starting pitcher Jim Whitney. In 33 games pitched during the 1889 season, he posted a 12–10 win–loss record, he started 22, completed 19, and recorded one shutout. Although his fastball was difficult to hit, he did not have good control of it, walking 116 batters in 225 innings pitched, although he struck out 109 and led the league with 11 games finished.

New York

1890–1892

The Hoosiers disbanded at the conclusion of the 1889 season, and on March 22, 1890, he, along with many of his teammates, were transferred to the New York Giants by the league to strengthen the NL's largest market. Coming into the 1890 season, Rusie filled the starting position that was vacated by future Hall of Famer Tim Keefe, who had joined the New York Giants of the newly formed Players' League (PL). Instead evenly splitting pitching duties Mickey Welch, another future Hall of Fame player, as Keefe had done the preceding five seasons, he appeared in 73 games to Welch's 37.

Rusie quickly became sensation amongs fans, media, and society due to the combination of his pitching velocity and physical size at , , which was considered large for the era. The fans began calling him the "Hoosier Thunderbolt", while famed vaudeville act Weber and Fields used his name, a paperback book, ''Secrets of Amos Rusie, The World's Greatest Pitcher, How He Obtained His Incredible Speed on Balls'', was available for a quarter, a drink was named after him, and received a message from the popular performer Lillian Russell.

On May 9, the Giants defeated the Boston Beaneaters by a score of 16–3; doing so by committing no errors, very rare for the era, and Rusie allowing just 6 hits. Three days later, on May 12, was on the winning side of a pitching duel with future Hall of Famer Kid Nichols, in a game that ended with a home run by the Giants' Mike Tiernan in the 13th inning. The home run was described as "tape measure" hit, which sailed over the outfield fence and landed onto an adjacient baseball field, Brotherhood Park, where a PL game was being played at the same time, causing fans of both parks to cheer.

Rusie's completed the season with 67 games pitched, 62 games started, 56 complete games, four shutouts, 548.2 innings pitched, 2.56 earned run average (ERA), and a league-leading total of 341 strikeouts, the highest seasonal total he would have in his career. Due to the lack of control of his pitches, however, he also led the league with 289 walks, the all-time record for a season, and tossed 36 wild pitches, another total that topped the league. The Giants finished in sixth place among the eight NL teams, while Rusie won 29 games and had a league-leading 34 losses. As a hitter, he had a successful season with .278 batting average in 284 at bats, 13 doubles, six triples, and he scored 31 runs. Rusie married May Smith in Muncie, Indiana on November 8, 1890, in the Delaware County Clerk's Office.

After the demise of the PL following the 1890 season, the Giants absorbed many of the players who had been on the crosstown rivals' roster. Future Hall of Famers Roger Connor, Jim O'Rourke, Buck Ewing, Tim Keefe simply returned to the team, as well as George Gore, while John Ewing, and Danny Richardson were new signings, solidifying both a powerful hitting line-up and a solid pitching rotation for the 1891 season. While the upgraded Giants improved their final standings by finishing in third place among eight teams in the NL, and had a four game lead over the Chicago Colts on June 16 when Rusie held them scoreless, and were 2.5 games behind the Colts on September 19, they were 13 games back at the close of the season.

After having been on the losing end of no-hitter by Tom Lovett of the Brooklyn Bridegrooms on June 22, Rusie returned the favor by throwing one of his own against them just over a month later on July 31. After winning both games of doubleheader against the Bridegrooms on September, Rusie and several other star players were rested for the remainder of the season, a five-game series against the Boston Beaneaters. Rusie's 337 strikeouts and 262 bases on balls led the league for the second consecutive year, and his six shutouts marked the first time he led the league in that category. His record improved to 33-20.

1893–1898

With the pitching area being moved back in 1893, Rusie’s strikeout total dropped from 288 to 208. Still he was league leader. The 1893 campaign was a truly extraordinary one for Amos Rusie. He had 50 complete games out of 52 starts and went 33-21.

In 1894, Rusie won pitching’s triple crown. He led the league in wins, going 36-13, strikeouts with 195, and a league best ERA of 2.78 (especially spectacular considering the league average that year was 5.32). After the conclusion of the 1894 regular season, a Pittsburgh sportsman named William C. Temple sponsored a trophy for the winner between the regular season 1st and 2nd place teams in the National League. The runner-up Giants swept the Baltimore Orioles, who featured Hall of Famers John McGraw and Wilbert Robinson, 4-0. Amos Rusie was virtually untouchable in the Temple Cup, giving up only one earned run while winning two complete games and compiling a 0.50 ERA; if that was not enough, he even batted .429. Amos Rusie’s win total that year was fourth best since the modern pitching distance of 60’-6” was established.

Amos Rusie won his last strikeout crown in the 1895 campaign with 201. However, he finished with a mediocre (by Rusie's standards) 23 wins and 23 losses. After a bitter contract dispute with Giants' owner Andrew Freedman, Rusie responded by publicly thumbing his nose at Freedman, which was the 19th century variant of the middle finger. He was fined $200 (he made only $2,500 a year). Rusie refused to play until Freedman returned his money and ended up holding out for the entire 1896 season. It was a fiasco for baseball; fans boycotted and the press railed against the owners. Owners implored Rusie and Freedman to compromise; neither would budge. The holdout was finally settled just prior to the 1897 season, as the owners collaborated for recoupment of the garnished wages, as well as a $5,000 settlement. This was partially out of respect for Rusie. However, the primary motivator was the threat of legal action against the reserve clause had his case gone to court.

Following the 1898 season, a combination of hearing damage from a line drive to the head, arm trouble, and personal problems kept him out of baseball for two years. In 1900, he was traded to the Cincinnati Reds for Christy Mathewson. In 1901, Rusie pitched poorly in three games before retiring. He finished his career with 245 wins, 174 losses, 1934 strikeouts and a 3.07 ERA.

Rusie was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1977.

See also

List of Major League Baseball leaders in career wins

Triple Crown

List of Major League Baseball ERA champions

List of Major League Baseball strikeout champions

List of Major League Baseball wins champions

Top 100 strikeout pitchers of all time

Major League Baseball titles leaders

List of Major League Baseball no-hitters

References

External links

Category:1871 births Category:1942 deaths Category:National Baseball Hall of Fame inductees Category:Indianapolis Hoosiers (NL) players Category:New York Giants (NL) players Category:Cincinnati Reds players Category:Baseball players from Indiana Category:National League Pitching Triple Crown winners Category:National League ERA champions Category:National League strikeout champions Category:National League wins champions Category:Burlington Babies players

ja:エイモス・ルーシー

name	Jane Austen
birth date	December 16, 1775
birth place	Steventon Rectory, Hampshire
death date	July 18, 1817
death place	Winchester, Hampshire
resting place	Winchester Cathedral, Hampshire
period	1787 to 1809-1811
genre	Romance
notableworks	Pride and PrejudiceSense and Sensibility
signature	Jane Austen signature from her will.svg|200px|Signature from Austen's 1817 will.
portaldisp	y }}

Jane Austen (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature, her realism and biting social commentary cementing her historical importance among scholars and critics.

Austen lived her entire life as part of a close-knit family located on the lower fringes of the English landed gentry. She was educated primarily by her father and older brothers as well as through her own reading. The steadfast support of her family was critical to her development as a professional writer. Her artistic apprenticeship lasted from her teenage years until she was about 35 years old. During this period, she experimented with various literary forms, including the epistolary novel which she tried then abandoned, and wrote and extensively revised three major novels and began a fourth. From 1811 until 1816, with the release of ''Sense and Sensibility'' (1811), ''Pride and Prejudice'' (1813), ''Mansfield Park'' (1814) and ''Emma'' (1816), she achieved success as a published writer. She wrote two additional novels, ''Northanger Abbey'' and ''Persuasion'', both published posthumously in 1818, and began a third, which was eventually titled ''Sanditon'', but died before completing it.

Austen's works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century realism. Her plots, though fundamentally comic, highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security. Her work brought her little personal fame and only a few positive reviews during her lifetime, but the publication in 1869 of her nephew's ''A Memoir of Jane Austen'' introduced her to a wider public, and by the 1940s she had become widely accepted in academia as a great English writer. The second half of the 20th century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship and the emergence of a Janeite fan culture.

Biography

Biographical information concerning Jane Austen is "famously scarce", according to one biographer. Only some personal and family letters remain (by one estimate only 160 out of Austen's 3,000 letters are extant), and her sister Cassandra (to whom most of the letters were originally addressed) burned "the greater part" of the ones she kept and censored those she did not destroy. Other letters were destroyed by the heirs of Admiral Francis Austen, Jane's brother. Most of the biographical material produced for fifty years after Austen's death was written by her relatives and reflects the family's biases in favour of "good quiet Aunt Jane". Scholars have unearthed little information since.

Family

Austen's parents, George Austen (1731–1805), and his wife Cassandra (1739–1827), were members of substantial gentry families. George was descended from a family of woollen manufacturers, which had risen through the professions to the lower ranks of the landed gentry. Cassandra was a member of the prominent Leigh family; they married on 26 April 1764 at Walcot Church in Bath. From 1765 until 1801, that is, for much of Jane's life, George Austen served as the rector of the Anglican parishes at Steventon, Hampshire and a nearby village. From 1773 until 1796, he supplemented this income by farming and by teaching three or four boys at a time who boarded at his home.

Austen's immediate family was large: six brothers—James (1765–1819), George (1766–1838), Edward (1767–1852), Henry Thomas (1771–1850), Francis William (Frank) (1774–1865), Charles John (1779–1852)—and one sister, Cassandra Elizabeth (Steventon, Hampshire, 9 January 1773–1845), who, like Jane, died unmarried. Cassandra Elizabeth was Austen's closest friend and confidante throughout her life. Of her brothers, Austen felt closest to Henry, who became a banker and, after his bank failed, an Anglican clergyman. Henry was also his sister's literary agent. His large circle of friends and acquaintances in London included bankers, merchants, publishers, painters, and actors: he provided Austen with a view of social worlds not normally visible from a small parish in rural Hampshire. George was sent to live with a local family at a young age because, as Austen biographer Le Faye describes it, he was "mentally abnormal and subject to fits". He may also have been deaf and mute.

Early life and education

Austen was born on 16 December 1775 at Steventon rectory and publicly christened on 5 April 1776. After a few months at home, her mother placed Austen with Elizabeth Littlewood, a woman living nearby, who nursed and raised Austen for a year or eighteen months. In 1783, according to family tradition, Jane and Cassandra were sent to Oxford to be educated by Mrs. Ann Cawley and they moved with her to Southampton later in the year. Both girls caught typhus and Jane nearly died. Austen was subsequently educated at home, until leaving for boarding school with her sister Cassandra early in 1785. The school curriculum probably included some French, spelling, needlework, dancing and music and, perhaps, drama. By December 1786, Jane and Cassandra had returned home because the Austens could not afford to send both of their daughters to school.

Austen acquired the remainder of her education by reading books, guided by her father and her brothers James and Henry. George Austen apparently gave his daughters unfettered access to his large and varied library, was tolerant of Austen's sometimes risqué experiments in writing, and provided both sisters with expensive paper and other materials for their writing and drawing. According to Park Honan, a biographer of Austen, life in the Austen home was lived in "an open, amused, easy intellectual atmosphere" where the ideas of those with whom the Austens might disagree politically or socially were considered and discussed. After returning from school in 1786, Austen "never again lived anywhere beyond the bounds of her immediate family environment".

Private theatricals were also a part of Austen's education. From when she was seven until she was thirteen, the family and close friends staged a series of plays, including Richard Sheridan's ''The Rivals'' (1775) and David Garrick's ''Bon Ton''. While the details are unknown, Austen would certainly have joined in these activities, as a spectator at first and as a participant when she was older. Most of the plays were comedies, which suggests one way in which Austen's comedic and satirical gifts were cultivated.

Juvenilia

Perhaps as early as 1787, Austen began to write poems, stories, and plays for her own and her family's amusement. Austen later compiled "fair copies" of 29 of these early works into three bound notebooks, now referred to as the ''Juvenilia'', containing pieces originally written between 1787 and 1793. There is manuscript evidence that Austen continued to work on these pieces as late as the period 1809–11, and that her niece and nephew, Anna and James Edward Austen, made further additions as late as 1814. Among these works are a satirical novel in letters titled ''Love and Freindship'' [''sic''], in which she mocked popular novels of sensibility, and ''The History of England'', a manuscript of 34 pages accompanied by 13 watercolour miniatures by her sister Cassandra.

Austen's ''History'' parodied popular historical writing, particularly Oliver Goldsmith's ''History of England'' (1764). Austen wrote, for example: "Henry the 4th ascended the throne of England much to his own satisfaction in the year 1399, after having prevailed on his cousin & predecessor Richard the 2nd, to resign it to him, & to retire for the rest of his Life to Pomfret Castle, where he happened to be murdered." Austen's ''Juvenilia'' are often, according to scholar Richard Jenkyns, "boisterous" and "anarchic"; he compares them to the work of 18th-century novelist Laurence Sterne and the 20th century comedy group Monty Python.

Adulthood

As Austen grew into adulthood, she continued to live at her parents' home, carrying out those activities normal for women of her age and social standing: she practised the fortepiano, assisted her sister and mother with supervising servants, and attended female relatives during childbirth and older relatives on their deathbeds. She sent short pieces of writing to her newborn nieces Fanny Catherine and Jane Anna Elizabeth. Austen was particularly proud of her accomplishments as a seamstress. She also attended church regularly, socialized frequently with friends and neighbours, and read novels—often of her own composition—aloud with her family in the evenings. Socializing with the neighbours often meant dancing, either impromptu in someone's home after supper or at the balls held regularly at the assembly rooms in the town hall. Her brother Henry later said that "Jane was fond of dancing, and excelled in it".

In 1793, Austen began and then abandoned a short play, later entitled ''Sir Charles Grandison or the happy Man, a comedy in 6 acts'', which she returned to and completed around 1800. This was a short parody of various school textbook abridgments of Austen's favourite contemporary novel, ''The History of Sir Charles Grandison'' (1753), by Samuel Richardson. Honan speculates that at some point not long after writing ''Love and Freindship'' [sic] in 1789, Austen decided to "write for profit, to make stories her central effort", that is, to become a professional writer. Whenever she made that decision, beginning in about 1793, Austen began to write longer, more sophisticated works. It is unlike any of Austen's other works. Austen biographer Claire Tomalin describes the heroine of the novella as a sexual predator who uses her intelligence and charm to manipulate, betray, and abuse her victims, whether lovers, friends or family. Tomalin writes: "Told in letters, it is as neatly plotted as a play, and as cynical in tone as any of the most outrageous of the Restoration dramatists who may have provided some of her inspiration....It stands alone in Austen's work as a study of an adult woman whose intelligence and force of character are greater than those of anyone she encounters."

Early novels

After finishing ''Lady Susan'', Austen attempted her first full-length novel—''Elinor and Marianne''. Her sister Cassandra later remembered that it was read to the family "before 1796" and was told through a series of letters. Without surviving original manuscripts, there is no way to know how much of the original draft survived in the novel published in 1811 as ''Sense and Sensibility''.

When Austen was twenty, Tom Lefroy, a nephew of neighbours, visited Steventon from December 1795 to January 1796. He had just finished a university degree and was moving to London to train as a barrister. Lefroy and Austen would have been introduced at a ball or other neighbourhood social gathering, and it is clear from Austen's letters to Cassandra that they spent considerable time together: "I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together." The Lefroy family intervened and sent him away at the end of January. Marriage was impractical, as both Lefroy and Austen must have known. Neither had any money, and he was dependent on a great-uncle in Ireland to finance his education and establish his legal career. If Tom Lefroy later visited Hampshire, he was carefully kept away from the Austens, and Jane Austen never saw him again.

Austen began work on a second novel, ''First Impressions'', in 1796. She completed the initial draft in August 1797 when she was only 21 (it later became ''Pride and Prejudice''); as with all of her novels, Austen read the work aloud to her family as she was working on it and it became an "established favourite". At this time, her father made the first attempt to publish one of her novels. In November 1797, George Austen wrote to Thomas Cadell, an established publisher in London, to ask if he would consider publishing "a Manuscript Novel, comprised in three Vols. about the length of Miss Burney's Evelina" (''First Impressions'') at the author's financial risk. Cadell quickly returned Mr. Austen's letter, marked "Declined by Return of Post". Austen may not have known of her father's efforts. Following the completion of ''First Impressions'', Austen returned to ''Elinor and Marianne'' and from November 1797 until mid-1798, revised it heavily; she eliminated the epistolary format in favour of third-person narration and produced something close to ''Sense and Sensibility''.

During the middle of 1798, after finishing revisions of ''Elinor and Marianne'', Austen began writing a third novel with the working title ''Susan''—later ''Northanger Abbey''—a satire on the popular Gothic novel. Austen completed her work about a year later. In early 1803, Henry Austen offered ''Susan'' to Benjamin Crosby, a London publisher, who paid £10 for the copyright. Crosby promised early publication and went so far as to advertise the book publicly as being "in the press", but did nothing more. The manuscript remained in Crosby's hands, unpublished, until Austen repurchased the copyright from him in 1816.

Bath and Southampton

In December 1800, Mr Austen unexpectedly announced his decision to retire from the ministry, leave Steventon, and move the family to Bath. While retirement and travel were good for the elder Austens, Jane Austen was shocked to be told she was moving from the only home she had ever known. An indication of Austen's state of mind is her lack of productivity as a writer during the time she lived at Bath. She was able to make some revisions to ''Susan'', and she began and then abandoned a new novel, ''The Watsons'', but there was nothing like the productivity of the years 1795–99. Tomalin suggests this reflects a deep depression disabling her as a writer, but Honan disagrees, arguing Austen wrote or revised her manuscripts throughout her creative life, except for a few months after her father died.

In December 1802, Austen received her only proposal of marriage. She and her sister visited Alethea and Catherine Bigg, old friends who lived near Basingstoke. Their younger brother, Harris Bigg-Wither, had recently finished his education at Oxford and was also at home. Bigg-Wither proposed and Austen accepted. As described by Caroline Austen, Jane's niece, and Reginald Bigg-Wither, a descendant, Harris was not attractive—he was a large, plain-looking man who spoke little, stuttered when he did speak, was aggressive in conversation, and almost completely tactless. However, Austen had known him since both were young and the marriage offered many practical advantages to Austen and her family. He was the heir to extensive family estates located in the area where the sisters had grown up. With these resources, Austen could provide her parents a comfortable old age, give Cassandra a permanent home and, perhaps, assist her brothers in their careers. By the next morning, Austen realised she had made a mistake and withdrew her acceptance. No contemporary letters or diaries describe how Austen felt about this proposal. In 1814, Austen wrote a letter to her niece, Fanny Knight, who had asked for advice about a serious relationship, telling her that "having written so much on one side of the question, I shall now turn around & entreat you not to commit yourself farther, & not to think of accepting him unless you really do like him. Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection".

In 1804, while living in Bath, Austen started but did not complete a new novel, ''The Watsons''. The story centres on an invalid clergyman with little money and his four unmarried daughters. Sutherland describes the novel as "a study in the harsh economic realities of dependent women's lives". Honan suggests, and Tomalin agrees, that Austen chose to stop work on the novel after her father died on 21 January 1805 and her personal circumstances resembled those of her characters too closely for her comfort.

Mr Austen's final illness had struck suddenly, leaving him, as Austen reported to her brother Francis, "quite insensible of his own state", and he died quickly. Jane, Cassandra, and their mother were left in a precarious financial situation. Edward, James, Henry, and Francis Austen pledged to make annual contributions to support their mother and sisters. For the next four years, the family's living arrangements reflected their financial insecurity. They lived part of the time in rented quarters in Bath and then, beginning in 1806, in Southampton, where they shared a house with Frank Austen and his new wife. A large part of this time they spent visiting various branches of the family.

On 5 April 1809, about three months before the family's move to Chawton, Austen wrote an angry letter to Richard Crosby, offering him a new manuscript of ''Susan'' if that was needed to secure immediate publication of the novel, and otherwise requesting the return of the original so she could find another publisher. Crosby replied he had not agreed to publish the book by any particular time, or at all, and that Austen could repurchase the manuscript for the £10 he had paid her and find another publisher. However, Austen did not have the resources to repurchase the book.

Chawton

Around early 1809, Austen's brother Edward offered his mother and sisters a more settled life—the use of a large cottage in Chawton village that was part of Edward's nearby estate, Chawton House. Jane, Cassandra, and their mother moved into Chawton cottage on 7 July 1809. In Chawton, life was quieter than it had been since the family's move to Bath in 1800. The Austens did not socialise with the neighbouring gentry and entertained only when family visited. Austen's niece Anna described the Austen family's life in Chawton: "It was a very quiet life, according to our ideas, but they were great readers, and besides the housekeeping our aunts occupied themselves in working with the poor and in teaching some girl or boy to read or write." Austen wrote almost daily, but privately, and seems to have been relieved of some household responsibilities to give her more opportunity to write. In this setting, she was able to be productive as a writer once more.

Published author

During her time at Chawton, Jane Austen successfully published four novels, which were generally well-received. Through her brother Henry, the publisher Thomas Egerton agreed to publish ''Sense and Sensibility'', which appeared in October 1811. Reviews were favourable and the novel became fashionable among opinion-makers; the edition sold out by mid-1813. Austen's earnings from ''Sense and Sensibility'' provided her with some financial and psychological independence. Egerton then published ''Pride and Prejudice'', a revision of ''First Impressions'', in January 1813. He advertised the book widely and it was an immediate success, garnering three favourable reviews and selling well. By October 1813, Egerton was able to begin selling a second edition. ''Mansfield Park'' was published by Egerton in May 1814. While ''Mansfield Park'' was ignored by reviewers, it was a great success with the public. All copies were sold within six months, and Austen's earnings on this novel were larger than for any of her other novels.

Austen learned that the Prince Regent admired her novels and kept a set at each of his residences. In November 1815, the Prince Regent's librarian invited Austen to visit the Prince's London residence and hinted Austen should dedicate the forthcoming ''Emma'' to the Prince. Though Austen disliked the Prince, she could scarcely refuse the request. She later wrote ''Plan of a Novel, according to hints from various quarters'', a satiric outline of the "perfect novel" based on the librarian's many suggestions for a future Austen novel.

In mid-1815, Austen moved her work from Egerton to John Murray, a better known London publisher, who published ''Emma'' in December 1815 and a second edition of ''Mansfield Park'' in February 1816. ''Emma'' sold well but the new edition of ''Mansfield Park'' did not, and this failure offset most of the profits Austen earned on ''Emma''. These were the last of Austen's novels to be published during her lifetime.

While Murray prepared ''Emma'' for publication, Austen began to write a new novel she titled ''The Elliots'', later published as ''Persuasion''. She completed her first draft in July 1816. In addition, shortly after the publication of ''Emma'', Henry Austen repurchased the copyright for ''Susan'' from Crosby. Austen was forced to postpone publishing either of these completed novels by family financial troubles. Henry Austen's bank failed in March 1816, depriving him of all of his assets, leaving him deeply in debt and losing Edward, James, and Frank Austen large sums. Henry and Frank could no longer afford the contributions they had made to support their mother and sisters.

Illness and death

Early in 1816, Jane Austen began to feel unwell. She ignored her illness at first and continued to work and to participate in the usual round of family activities. By the middle of that year, her decline was unmistakable to Austen and to her family, and Austen's physical condition began a long, slow, and irregular deterioration culminating in her death the following year. The majority of Austen biographers rely on Dr. Vincent Cope's tentative 1964 retrospective diagnosis and list her cause of death as Addison's disease. However, her final illness has also been described as Hodgkin's lymphoma. Recent work by Katherine White of Britain's Addison’s Disease Self Help Group suggests that Austen likely died of bovine tuberculosis, a disease (now) commonly associated with drinking unpasteurized milk. One contributing factor or cause of her death, discovered by Linda Robinson Walker and described in the Winter 2010 issue of Persuasions on-line, might be Brill-Zinsser disease, a recurrent form of typhus, which she had as a child. Brill-Zinsser disease is to typhus as shingles is to chicken pox; when a victim of typhus endures stress, malnutrition or another infection, typhus can recur as Brill-Zinsser.

Austen continued to work in spite of her illness. She became dissatisfied with the ending of ''The Elliots'' and rewrote the final two chapters, finishing them on 6 August 1816. In January 1817, Austen began work on a new novel she called ''The Brothers'', later titled ''Sanditon'' upon its first publication in 1925, and completed twelve chapters before stopping work in mid-March 1817, probably because her illness prevented her from continuing. Austen made light of her condition to others, describing it as "Bile" and rheumatism, but as her disease progressed she experienced increasing difficulty walking or finding the energy for other activities. By mid-April, Austen was confined to her bed. In May, their brother Henry escorted Jane and Cassandra to Winchester for medical treatment. Austen died in Winchester on 18 July 1817, at the age of 41. Through his clerical connections, Henry arranged for his sister to be buried in the north aisle of the nave of Winchester Cathedral. The epitaph composed by her brother James praises Austen's personal qualities, expresses hope for her salvation, mentions the "extraordinary endowments of her mind", but does not explicitly mention her achievements as a writer.

Posthumous publication

After Austen's death, Cassandra and Henry Austen arranged with Murray for the publication of ''Persuasion'' and ''Northanger Abbey'' as a set in December 1817. Henry Austen contributed a ''Biographical Note'' which for the first time identified his sister as the author of the novels. Tomalin describes it as "a loving and polished eulogy". Sales were good for a year—only 321 copies remained unsold at the end of 1818—and then declined. Murray disposed of the remaining copies in 1820, and Austen's novels remained out of print for twelve years. In 1832, publisher Richard Bentley purchased the remaining copyrights to all of Austen's novels and, beginning in either December 1832 or January 1833, published them in five illustrated volumes as part of his ''Standard Novels'' series. In October 1833, Bentley published the first collected edition of Austen's works. Since then, Austen's novels have been continuously in print.

Reception

Contemporary responses

Austen's works brought her little personal renown because they were published anonymously. Although her novels quickly became fashionable among opinion-makers, such as Princess Charlotte Augusta, daughter of the Prince Regent, they received only a few published reviews. Most of the reviews were short and on balance favourable, although superficial and cautious. They most often focused on the moral lessons of the novels. Sir Walter Scott, a leading novelist of the day, contributed one of them, anonymously. Using the review as a platform from which to defend the then disreputable genre of the novel, he praised Austen's realism. The other important early review of Austen's works was published by Richard Whately in 1821. He drew favourable comparisons between Austen and such acknowledged greats as Homer and Shakespeare, praising the dramatic qualities of her narrative. Whately and Scott set the tone for almost all subsequent 19th-century Austen criticism.

Nineteenth century

Because Austen's novels failed to conform to Romantic and Victorian expectations that "powerful emotion [be] authenticated by an egregious display of sound and colour in the writing", 19th-century critics and audiences generally preferred the works of Charles Dickens and George Eliot. Though Austen's novels were republished in Britain beginning in the 1830s and remained steady sellers, they were not bestsellers.

Austen had many admiring readers in the 19th century who considered themselves part of a literary elite: they viewed their appreciation of Austen's works as a mark of their cultural taste. Philosopher and literary critic George Henry Lewes expressed this viewpoint in a series of enthusiastic articles published in the 1840s and 1850s. This theme continued later in the century with novelist Henry James, who referred to Austen several times with approval and on one occasion ranked her with Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Henry Fielding as among "the fine painters of life".

The publication of James Edward Austen-Leigh's ''A Memoir of Jane Austen'' in 1869 introduced Austen to a wider public as "dear aunt Jane", the respectable maiden aunt. Publication of the ''Memoir'' spurred the reissue of Austen's novels—the first popular editions were released in 1883 and fancy illustrated editions and collectors' sets quickly followed. Author and critic Leslie Stephen described the popular mania that started to develop for Austen in the 1880s as "Austenolatry". Around the turn of the century, members of the literary elite reacted against the popularization of Austen. They referred to themselves as ''Janeites'' in order to distinguish themselves from the masses who did not properly understand her works. For example, James responded negatively to what he described as "a beguiled infatuation" with Austen, a rising tide of public interest that exceeded Austen's "intrinsic merit and interest".

During the last quarter of the 19th century, the first books of criticism on Austen were published. In fact, after the publication of the ''Memoir'', more criticism was published on Austen in two years than had appeared in the previous fifty.

Twentieth century and beyond

Several important works paved the way for Austen's novels to become a focus of academic study. The first important milestone was a 1911 essay by Oxford Shakespearean scholar A. C. Bradley, which is "generally regarded as the starting-point for the serious academic approach to Jane Austen". In it, he established the groupings of Austen's "early" and "late" novels, which are still used by scholars today. The second was R. W. Chapman's 1923 edition of Austen's collected works. Not only was it the first scholarly edition of Austen's works, it was also the first scholarly edition of any English novelist. The Chapman text has remained the basis for all subsequent published editions of Austen's works. With the publication in 1939 of Mary Lascelles's ''Jane Austen and Her Art'', the academic study of Austen took hold. Lascelles's innovative work included an analysis of the books Jane Austen read and the effect of her reading on her work, an extended analysis of Austen's style, and her "narrative art". At the time, concern arose over the fact that academics were taking over Austen criticism and it was becoming increasingly esoteric—a debate that has continued to the beginning of the 21st century. In a spurt of revisionist views in the 1940s, scholars approached Austen more sceptically and argued that she was a subversive writer. These revisionist views, together with F. R. Leavis's and Ian Watt's pronouncement that Austen was one of the great writers of English fiction, did much to cement Austen's reputation amongst academics. They agreed that she "combined [Henry Fielding's and Samuel Richardson's] qualities of interiority and irony, realism and satire to form an author superior to both". The period since World War II has seen more scholarship on Austen using a diversity of critical approaches, including feminist theory, and perhaps most controversially, postcolonial theory. However, the continuing disconnection between the popular appreciation of Austen, particularly by modern Janeites, and the academic appreciation of Austen has widened considerably. Jane Austen was the favourite novelist of political philosopher Leo Strauss.

Sequels, prequels, and adaptations of almost every sort have been based on the novels of Jane Austen, from soft-core pornography to fantasy. Beginning in the middle of the 19th century, Austen family members published conclusions to her incomplete novels, and by 2000 there were over 100 printed adaptations. The first film adaptation was the 1940 MGM production of ''Pride and Prejudice'' starring Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson. BBC television dramatisations, which were first produced in the 1970s, attempted to adhere meticulously to Austen's plots, characterisations, and settings. In 1995 a great wave of Austen adaptations began to appear, with Ang Lee's film of ''Sense and Sensibility'', for which screenwriter and star Emma Thompson won an Academy Award, and the BBC's immensely popular TV mini-series ''Pride and Prejudice'', starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth.

Books and scripts that use the general storyline of Austen's novels but change or otherwise modernise the story also became popular at the end of the 20th century. For example, ''Clueless'' (1995), Amy Heckerling's updated version of ''Emma'', which takes place in Beverly Hills, became a cultural phenomenon and spawned its own television series. In a 2002 vote to determine whom the UK public considers the greatest British people in history, Austen was ranked number 70 in the list of the "''100 Greatest Britons''". In 2003, Austen's ''Pride and Prejudice'' came second in the BBC's Big Read, a national poll to find the "Nation's best-loved book."

List of works

Novels

''Sense and Sensibility'' (1811)

''Pride and Prejudice'' (1813)

''Mansfield Park'' (1814)

''Emma'' (1815)

''Northanger Abbey'' (1818) (posthumous)

''Persuasion'' (1818) (posthumous)

Short fiction

''Lady Susan'' (1794, 1805)

Unfinished fiction

''The Watsons'' (1804)

''Sanditon'' (1817)

Other works ''Sir Charles Grandison'' (1793, 1800)

''Plan of a Novel'' (1815)

Poems

Prayers

Letters

Juvenilia – Volume the First

Frederic & Elfrida

Jack & Alice

Edgar & Emma

Henry and Eliza

The Adventures of Mr. Harley

Sir William Mountague

Memoirs of Mr. Clifford

The Beautifull Cassandra

Amelia Webster

The Visit

The Mystery

The Three Sisters

A beautiful description

The generous Curate

Ode to Pity

Juvenilia – Volume the Second Love and Freindship

Lesley Castle

The History of England

A Collection of Letters

The female philosopher

The first Act of a Comedy

A Letter from a Young Lady

A Tour through Wales

A Tale

Juvenilia – Volume the Third

Evelyn

Catharine, or the Bower

See also

Family tree showing Jane Austen, her parents and her siblings

Family tree showing Jane Austen's siblings and her nephews and nieces

Timeline of Jane Austen

Styles and themes of Jane Austen

Notes

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References

Bibliography

Primary works

Austen, Jane. ''Catharine and Other Writings''. Ed. Margaret Anne Doody and Douglas Murray. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-19-282823-1.

Austen, Jane. ''The History of England''. Ed. David Starkey. Icon Books, HarperCollins Publishers, 2006. ISBN 0-06-135195-4.

Le Faye, Deirdre, ed. ''Jane Austen's Letters''. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. ISBN 0-19-283297-2.

Secondary works

Biographies

Austen, Henry Thomas. "Biographical Notice of the Author". ''Northanger Abbey and Persuasion''. London: John Murray, 1817.

Austen-Leigh, James Edward. ''A Memoir of Jane Austen''. 1926. Ed. R. W. Chapman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Austen-Leigh, William and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh. ''Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters, A Family Record''. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1913.

Fergus, Jan. ''Jane Austen: A Literary Life''. London: Macmillan, 1991. ISBN 0-333-44701-8.

Honan, Park. ''Jane Austen: A Life''. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987. ISBN 0-312-01451-1.

Le Faye, Deirdre. ''Jane Austen: A Family Record''. Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-521-53417-8.

Nokes, David. ''Jane Austen: A Life''. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. ISBN 0520216067.

Tomalin, Claire. ''Jane Austen: A Life''. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. ISBN 0-679-44628-1.

Essay collections

''A Jane Austen Devotional''. Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2011. ISBN 978-1-4003-1953-4.

Alexander, Christine and Juliet McMaster, eds. ''The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-521-81293-3.

Copeland, Edward and Juliet McMaster, eds. ''The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-521-49867-8.

Grey, J. David, ed. ''The Jane Austen Companion''. New York: Macmillan, 1986. ISBN 0-02-545540-0.

Lynch, Deidre, ed. ''Janeites: Austen's Disciples and Devotees''. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. ISBN 0-691-05005-8.

Southam, B. C., ed. ''Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, 1812–1870''. Vol. 1. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968. ISBN 0-7100-2942-X.

Southam, B. C., ed. ''Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, 1870–1940''. Vol. 2. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987. ISBN 0-7102-0189-3.

Todd, Janet, ed. ''Jane Austen In Context''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-521-82644-6.

Watt, Ian, ed. ''Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays''. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963. ISBN 9780-130-53769-0.

Monographs and articles

Armstrong, Nancy. ''Desire and Domestic Fiction''. London: Oxford University Press, 1987. ISBN 0-19-506160-8.

Butler, Marilyn. ''Jane Austen and the War of Ideas''. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. ISBN 0-19-812968-8.

Byrne, Paula. ''Jane Austen and the Theatre''. London and New York: Continuum, 2002. ISBN 978-1847250476.

Collins, Irene. ''Jane Austen and the Clergy''. London: The Hambledon Press, 1994. ISBN 1-85285-114-7.

Devlin, D. D. ''Jane Austen and Education''. London: Macmillan, 1975. ISBN 0-333-14431-7.

Duckworth, Alistair M. ''The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels''. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971. ISBN 0-8018-1269-0.

Fergus, Jan. ''Jane Austen and the Didactic Novel''. Totowa: Barnes & Noble, 1983. ISBN 0-389-20228-2.

Ferguson, Moira. "''Mansfield Park'', Slavery, Colonialism, and Gender". ''Oxford Literary Review'' 13 (1991): 118–39.

Galperin, William. ''The Historical Austen''. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. ISBN 0-812-23687-4.

Gay, Penny. ''Jane Austen and the Theatre''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-521-65213-8.

Gubar, Susan and Sandra Gilbert. ''The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination''. 1979. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. ISBN 0-300-02596-3.

Harding, D. W., "Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen". ''Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays''. Ed. Ian Watt. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963.

Jenkyns, Richard. ''A Fine Brush on Ivory: An Appreciation of Jane Austen''. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-19-927661-7.

Johnson, Claudia L. ''Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel''. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. ISBN 0-226-40139-1.

Kirkham, Margaret. ''Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction''. Brighton: Harvester, 1983. ISBN 0-710-80468-7.

Koppel, Gene. ''The Religious Dimension in Jane Austen's Novels''. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1988.

Lascelles, Mary. ''Jane Austen and Her Art''. Original publication 1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Leavis, F. R. ''The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad''. London: Chatto & Windus, 1960.

Litz, A. Walton. ''Jane Austen: A Study of Her Development''. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Lynch, Deidre. ''The Economy of Character''. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. ISBN 0-226-49820-4.

MacDonagh, Oliver. ''Jane Austen: Real and Imagined Worlds''. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. ISBN 0-300-05084-4.

Miller, D. A. ''Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style''. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-691-12387-X.

Mudrick, Marvin. ''Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery''. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952.

Page, Norman. ''The Language of Jane Austen''. Oxford: Blackwell, 1972. ISBN 0-631-08280-8.

Poovey, Mary. ''The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen''. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. ISBN 0-226-67528-9.

Raven, James. ''The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade''. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. ISBN 0-300-12261-6.

Said, Edward W. ''Culture and Imperialism''. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. ISBN 0-679-75054-1.

Todd, Janet. ''The Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-521-67469-7.

Waldron, Mary. ''Jane Austen and the Fiction of Her Time''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-521-00388-1.

Wiltshire, John. ''Recreating Jane Austen''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-521-00282-6.

Wiltshire, John. ''Jane Austen and the Body: The Picture of Health''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. ISBN 0-521-41476-8.

External links

Online works

Works by Jane Austen – etexts by Electronic Literature Foundation

E-books of Austen's work in ePub, mobipocket, and pdf. Includes the complete ''Juvenilia''.

Jane Austen's work in Kindle format.

Works by Jane Austen – e-books in HTML

Works by Jane Austen – printable PDF ebooks

''A Memoir of Jane Austen'' by James Edward Austen-Leigh

Museums

Jane Austen's House Museum in Chawton

The Jane Austen Centre in Bath

Special Collections

Jane Austen Collections at Goucher College

Fan sites and societies

The Republic of Pemberley: the largest Jane Austen site on the web.

The Jane Austen Society of Australia

The Jane Austen Society of North America

The Jane Austen Society of the United Kingdom

Other

Category:1775 births Category:1817 deaths Category:18th-century English people Category:19th-century English people Category:Culture in Bath, Somerset Category:Burials at Winchester Cathedral Category:Deaths from tuberculosis Category:English Anglicans Category:English novelists Category:English romantic fiction writers Category:English women writers Category:History of Bath, Somerset Category:History of Winchester Category:Infectious disease deaths in England Category:People from Hampshire Category:People from Reading, Berkshire Category:Women novelists Category:Women of the Regency era

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name	Jules Gabriel Verne
birth name	Jules Gabriel Verne
birth date	February 08, 1828
birth place	Nantes, France
death date	March 24, 1905
death place	Amiens, France
occupation	Author
language	French
nationality	French
genre	Science-fiction
notableworks	''Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea'', ''A Journey to the Center of the Earth'', ''Around the World in Eighty Days'', ''The Mysterious Island''
spouse	Honorine Hebe du Fraysse de Viane (Morel) Verne
children	Michel Verne and step-daughters Valentine and Suzanne Morel
influences	Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Józef Sękowski, Edgar Allan Poe, James Fenimore Cooper, Jacques Arago, Daniel Defoe, Johann David Wyss, George Sand, Erckmann-Chatrian, Adolphe d'Ennery
influenced	H.G. Wells, Hugo Gernsback, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Donald G. Payne, Steampunk, Emilio Salgari, Paschal Grousset,
signature	Firma de Julio Verne.svg
portaldisp	}}

Jules Gabriel Verne (; February 8, 1828 – March 24, 1905) was a French author who pioneered the science-fiction genre. He is best known for his novels ''Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea'' (1870), ''A Journey to the Center of the Earth'' (1864), and ''Around the World in Eighty Days'' (1873). Verne wrote about space, air, and underwater travel before air travel and practical submarines were invented, and before practical means of space travel had been devised. He is the second most translated individual author in the world, according to Index Translationum. Some of his books have also been made into live-action and animated films and television shows. Verne, along with Hugo Gernsback and H. G. Wells, is often popularly referred to as the "Father of Science Fiction".

Early life

Jules Gabriel Verne was born in Nantes, Brittany () in France, to Pierre Verne, an attorney, and his wife, Sophie Allote de la Fuÿe. Jules spent his early years at home with his parents in the bustling harbor city of Nantes. The family spent summers in a country house just outside the city, in Brains on the banks of the Loire River. Here Jules and his brother Paul would often rent a boat for a Franc a day. The sight of the many ships navigating the river sparked Jules's imagination, as he describes in the autobiographical short story "Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse". At the age of nine, Jules and Paul, of whom he was very fond, were sent to boarding school at the Saint Donatien College (Petit séminaire de Saint-Donatien). As a child, he developed a great interest in travel and exploration, a passion he showed as a writer of adventure stories and science fiction. His interest in writing often cost him progress in other subjects.

At the boarding school, Verne studied Latin, which he used in his short story "Le Mariage de Monsieur Anselme des Tilleuls" in the mid 1850s. One of his teachers may have been the French inventor Brutus de Villeroi, professor of drawing and mathematics at the college in 1842, and who later became famous for creating the US Navy's first submarine, the USS ''Alligator''. De Villeroi may have inspired Verne's conceptual design for the Nautilus in ''Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea'', although no direct exchanges between the two men have been recorded.

Verne's second French biographer, his grand-niece Marguerite Allotte de la Fuÿe, formulated the rumor that Verne was so fascinated with adventure at an early age that he stowed away on a ship bound for the West Indies, but that Jules's voyage was cut short when he found his father waiting for him at the next port.

Literary debut

After completing his studies at the ''lycée'', Verne went to Paris to study for the bar. Around 1848, in conjunction with Michel Carré, he began writing libretti for operettas. For some years, his attentions were divided between the theatre and work, but some travelers' stories which he wrote for the ''Musée des familles'' revealed to him his true talent: the telling of delightfully extravagant voyages and adventures to which cleverly prepared scientific and geographical details lent an air of verisimilitude.

When Verne's father discovered that his son was writing rather than studying law, he promptly withdrew his financial support. Verne was forced to support himself as a stockbroker, which he hated despite being somewhat successful at it. During this period, he met Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, père, who offered him writing advice.

Verne also met Honorine de Viane Morel, a widow with two daughters. They were married on January 10, 1857. With her encouragement, he continued to write and actively looked for a publisher. On August 3, 1861, their son, Michel Jules Verne, was born. A classic ''enfant terrible'', Michel would marry an actress over Verne's objections, had two children by his underage mistress, and buried himself in debts. The relationship between father and son did improve as Michel grew older.

Verne's situation improved when he met Pierre-Jules Hetzel, one of the most important French publishers of the 19th century, who also published Victor Hugo, George Sand, and Erckmann-Chatrian, among others. They formed an excellent writer-publisher team until Hetzel's death. Hetzel helped improve Verne's writings, which until then had been repeatedly rejected by other publishers. Hetzel read a draft of Verne's story about the balloon exploration of Africa, which had been rejected by other publishers for being "too scientific". With Hetzel's help, Verne rewrote the story, which was published in 1863 in book form as ''Cinq semaines en ballon'' (''Five Weeks in a Balloon''). Acting on Hetzel's advice, Verne added comical accents to his novels, changed sad endings into happy ones, and toned down various political messages.

From that point, Hetzel published two or more volumes a year. The most successful of these include ''Voyage au centre de la Terre'' (''Journey to the Center of the Earth'', 1864); ''De la Terre à la Lune'' (''From the Earth to the Moon'', 1865); ''Vingt mille lieues sous les mers'' (''Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea'', 1869); and ''Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours'' (''Around the World in Eighty Days''), which first appeared in ''Le Temps'' in 1872. The series is collectively known as "Voyages Extraordinaires" ("extraordinary voyages"). Verne could now live on his writings. But most of his wealth came from the stage adaptations of ''Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours'' (1874) and ''Michel Strogoff'' (1876), which he wrote with Adolphe d'Ennery. In 1867, Verne bought a small ship, the ''Saint-Michel'', which he successively replaced with the ''Saint-Michel II'' and the ''Saint-Michel III'' as his financial situation improved. On board the ''Saint-Michel III'', he sailed around Europe. In 1870, he was appointed as "Chevalier" (Knight) of the Légion d'honneur. After his first novel, most of his stories were first serialised in the ''Magazine d'Éducation et de Récréation'', a Hetzel biweekly publication, before being published in the form of books. His brother Paul contributed to ''40th French climbing of the Mont-Blanc'' and a collection of short stories – ''Doctor Ox'' – in 1874. Verne became wealthy and famous. According to the Unesco Index Translationum, Jules Verne regularly places among the top five most translated authors in the world.

Later years

On March 9, 1886, as Verne was coming home, his twenty-five-year-old nephew, Gaston, shot him with a gun. One bullet missed, but the second entered Verne's left leg, giving him a limp that would not be cured. The incident was hushed up by the media, and Gaston spent the rest of his life in an asylum.

After the deaths of Hetzel and his beloved mother Sophie Henriette Allotte de la Fruye in 1887, Jules began writing darker works. This may partly be due to changes in his personality, but an important factor is the fact that Hetzel's son, who took over his father's business, was not as rigorous in his corrections as Hetzel had been. In 1888, Jules Verne entered politics and was elected town councillor of Amiens, where he championed several improvements and served for fifteen years. In 1905, while ill with diabetes, Verne died at his home, 44 Boulevard Longueville (now Boulevard Jules-Verne). Michel oversaw publication of his novels ''Invasion of the Sea'' and ''The Lighthouse at the End of the World''. The "Voyages extraordinaires" series continued for several years afterwards in the same rhythm of two volumes a year. It has later been discovered that Michel Verne had made extensive changes in these stories, and the original versions were published at the end of the 20th century.

In 1863, Jules Verne wrote a novel called ''Paris in the Twentieth Century'' about a young man who lives in a world of glass skyscrapers, high-speed trains, gas-powered automobiles, calculators, and a worldwide communications network, yet cannot find happiness and comes to a tragic end. Hetzel thought the novel's pessimism would damage Verne's then-booming career, and suggested he wait 20 years to publish it. Verne put the manuscript in a safe, where it was discovered by his great-grandson in 1989. It was published in 1994.

Reputation in English-speaking countries

While Verne is considered in many countries such as France as an author of quality books for young people, with a good command of his subjects, including technology and politics, his reputation in English-speaking countries suffered for a long time from poor translation.

Characteristic of much of late 19th-century writing, Verne's books often took a chauvinistic point of view. The British Empire was notably portrayed in a bad light in ''The Mysterious Island'', as Captain Nemo was revealed to be an Indian nobleman fighting the British Empire, which had not been mentioned in ''Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea''. The first English translator of ''Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea'' and ''From the Earth to the Moon, and a Trip Around It'', Reverend Lewis Page Mercier, working under a pseudonym, removed passages describing the political actions of Captain Nemo. However, such negative depictions were not invariable in Verne's works; for example, ''Facing the Flag'' features Lieutenant Devon, a heroic, self-sacrificing Royal Navy officer worthy of comparison with any written by British authors. Another example of a positive depiction of an Englishman is the brave and resourceful Phileas Fogg, the protagonist of ''Around the World in Eighty Days''.

Mercier and subsequent British translators also had trouble with the metric system that Verne used, sometimes dropping significant figures, at other times keeping the nominal value and only changing the unit to an Imperial measure. Thus Verne's calculations, which in general were remarkably exact, were converted into mathematical gibberish. Also, artistic passages and whole chapters were cut because of the need to fit the work in a constrained space for publication. (London author Cranstoun Metcalfe (1866–1938) translated most of Verne's work into English during the first half of the 20th century.)

For those reasons, Verne's work initially acquired a reputation in English-speaking countries for not being fit for adult readers. This, in turn, prevented him from being taken seriously enough to merit new translations, leading to those of Mercier and others being reprinted decade after decade. Only from 1965 on were some of his novels re-translated more accurately, but even today Verne's work has still not been fully rehabilitated in the English-speaking world.

Verne's works also reflect the bitterness France felt in the wake of defeat in the Franco-Prussian War from 1870 to 1871, and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine. ''The Begum's Millions'' (''Les Cinq cents millions de la Begum'') of 1879 gives a highly stereotypical depiction of Germans as monstrous cruel militarists. By contrast, almost all the protagonists in his pre-1871 works, such as the sympathetic first-person narrator in ''Journey to the Centre of the Earth'', are German.

Memorials

A restaurant built into the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France is named Le Jules Verne Restaurant. In June 1989, the Jules Verne Food Court opened at the Merry Hill Shopping Centre in the West Midlands of England; however, it had closed by the mid 1990s due to disappointing trade.

Hetzel's influence

Hetzel substantially influenced the writings of Verne, who was so happy to finally find a willing publisher that he agreed to almost all changes that Hetzel suggested. Hetzel rejected at least one novel (''Paris in the Twentieth Century'') and asked Verne to significantly change his other drafts. One of the most important changes Hetzel enforced on Verne was the adoption of optimism in his novels. Verne was in fact not an enthusiast of technological and human progress, as can be seen in his works created before he met Hetzel and after Hetzel's death. Hetzel's demand for optimistic texts proved correct. For example, ''Mysterious Island'' originally ended with the survivors returning to the mainland forever nostalgic about the island. Hetzel decided that the heroes should live happily, so in the revised draft, they use their fortunes to build a replica of the island. Many translations are like this. Also, in order not to offend France's then-ally, Russia, the origin and past of the famous Captain Nemo were changed from those of a Polish refugee avenging the partitions of Poland and the death of his family in the January Uprising repressions to those of an Indian prince fighting the British Empire after the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

Bibliography

Verne wrote numerous works, most famous of which are the 54 novels comprising the ''Voyages Extraordinaires''. He also wrote short stories, essays, plays, and poems.

His very first and better known works include: ''A Voyage in a Balloon (Un Voyage en ballon, August 1851 as published in ''Musee des familles'').

''Five Weeks in a Balloon'' (''Cinq semaines en ballon'', 1863)

''Paris in the Twentieth Century'' (''Paris au XXe siècle'', 1863, not published until 1994)

''A Journey to the Center of the Earth'' (''Voyage au centre de la Terre'', 1864)

''From the Earth to the Moon'' (''De la Terre à la Lune'', 1865)

''The Adventures of Captain Hatteras'' (''Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras'', 1866)

''In Search of the Castaways'' or ''Captain Grant's Children'' (''Les Enfants du capitaine Grant'', 1867–1868)

''Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea'' (''Vingt mille lieues sous les mers'', 1870)

''Around the Moon'' (''Autour de la lune'', a sequel to ''From the Earth to the Moon'', 1870)

''A Floating City'' (''Une ville flottante'', 1871)

"Dr. Ox's Experiment" (''Une Fantaisie du Docteur Ox'', 1872)

''The Adventures of Three Englishmen and Three Russians in South Africa'' (''Aventures de trois Russes et de trois Anglais'', 1872 )

''The Fur Country'' (''Le Pays des fourrures'', 1873)

''Around the World in Eighty Days'' (''Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours'', 1873)

''The Survivors of the Chancellor'' (''Le Chancellor'', 1875)

''The Mysterious Island'' (''L'Île mystérieuse'', 1875)

"The Blockade Runners", (1876)

''Michael Strogoff'' (''Michel Strogoff'', 1876)

''Off on a Comet'' (''Hector Servadac'', 1877)

''The Child of the Cavern'', also known as ''Black Diamonds'' or ''The Black Indies'' (''Les Indes noires'', 1877)

''Dick Sand, A Captain at Fifteen'' (''Un Capitaine de quinze ans'', 1878)

''The Begum's Millions'' (''Les Cinq cents millions de la Bégum'', 1879)

''The Steam House'' (''La Maison à vapeur'', 1879)

''Tribulations of a Chinaman in China'' (''Les Tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine''), 1879

''Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon'' (''La Jangada'', 1881)

''The Green Ray'' (''Le Rayon vert'', 1882)

''Kéraban the Inflexible'' (1883)

"Frritt-Flacc" (1884)

''The Vanished Diamond'' (''L’Étoile du sud'', 1884)

''The Archipelago on Fire'' (''L’Archipel en feu'', 1884)

''Mathias Sandorf'' (1885)

''Robur the Conqueror'' or ''The Clipper of the Clouds'' (''Robur-le-Conquérant'', 1886)

''Ticket No. "9672"'' (''Un Billet de loterie'', 1886 )

''North Against South'' (''Nord contre Sud'', 1887)

''The Flight to France'' (''Le Chemin de France'', 1887)

''Family Without a Name'' (''Famille-sans-nom'', 1888)

''Two Years' Vacation'' (''Deux Ans de vacances'', 1888)

''The Purchase of the North Pole'' (''Sans dessus dessous'', the second sequel to ''From the Earth to the Moon'', 1889)

''Mistress Branican'' (1891)

''The Carpathian Castle'' (''Le Château des Carpathes'', 1892)

''Claudius Bombarnac'' (''Claudius Bombarnac'', 1893)

''Propeller Island'' (''L’Île à hélice'', 1895)

''Facing the Flag'' (''Face au drapeau'', 1896)

''Clovis Dardentor'' (1896)

''The Sphinx of the Ice Fields'' or ''An Antarctic Mystery'' (''Le Sphinx des glaces'', a sequel to Edgar Allan Poe's ''The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym'', 1897)

''The Mighty Orinoco'' (''Le Superbe Orénoque'', 1897)

''The Village in the Treetops'' (''Le Village aérien'', 1901)

''The Kip Brothers'' (''Les Frères Kip'',1902)

''Master of the World'' (''Maître du monde'', sequel to ''Robur the Conqueror'', 1904)

''Invasion of the Sea'' (''L’Invasion de la mer'', 1904)

''A Drama in Livonia'' (''Un Drame en Livonie'', 1904)

''The Lighthouse at the End of the World'' (''Le Phare du bout du monde'', 1905)

''The Chase of the Golden Meteor'' (''La Chasse au météore'', 1908)

''The Danube Pilot'' (''Le Pilote du Danube'', 1908)

''The Survivors of the "Jonathan"'' (''Les Naufragés du « Jonathan »'', 1909)

See also

Paschal Grousset

Karl May

Zane Grey

B. Traven

Emilio Salgari

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Osip Senkovsky

Oshikawa Shunro

Steampunk, a style that took inspiration from Verne.

References

Further reading

William Butcher, Arthur C. Clarke (Introduction) (2006). ''Jules Verne: The Definitive Biography''. ISBN 1-56025-854-3

Herbert R. Lottman (1997). ''Jules Verne: An Exploratory Biography''. ISBN 0-312-14636-1

Philippe Melot, Jean-Marie Embs (2005).''Le Guide Jules Verne''. Les Editions de l'Amateur, Paris.ISBN 2-85917-417-6

Françoise Schiltz (2011). ''The Future Revisited: Jules Verne on Screen in 1950s America''. Chaplin Books, Gosport. ISBN 0-9565595-2-2

:*Translated as

External links

Bibliography

Les Voyages Extraordinaires – list of Verne works Compiled by Dennis Kytasaari. Bibliography.

Sources

Jules Verne's works: text, concordances and frequency list

A Jules Verne Centennial 1905–2005: A selection of early Jules Verne books and illustrations at the Smithsonian Institution Libraries edited by Norman M. Wolcott.

Zvi Har'El's Jules Verne Collection, including the Jules Verne Virtual Library, online sources of 51 of Jules Verne's novels translated into eight languages.

The Jules Verne Collecting Resource Page, complete online sources, posters, cards, autographs, first edition covers, etc..

Biography

Biography of Jules Verne

Reviews

"Jules Verne: Father of Science Fiction?", John Derbyshire, ''The New Atlantis'', Number 12, Spring 2006, pp. 81–90. A review of four new Jules Verne translations from the "Early Classics of Science Fiction" series by Wesleyan University Press.

''Jules Verne: An Exploratory Biography'', by Herbert R. Lottman – a review.

Misc

The maps from the Voyages Extraordinaires, scans of all the maps that were included in the original editions of Jules Verne’s novels.

Category:French science fiction writers Category:Science Fiction Hall of Fame inductees Category:French Roman Catholics Category:Operetta librettists Category:People from Nantes Category:Chevaliers of the Légion d'honneur Category:Roman Catholic writers Category:1828 births Category:1905 deaths Category:Maritime writers

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name	Charles Dickens
birth name	Charles John Huffam Dickens
birth date	February 07, 1812
birth place	Landport, Portsmouth, England
death date	June 09, 1870
death place	Gad's Hill Place, Higham, Kent, England
death cause	Stroke
resting place	Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey
resting place coordinates
nationality	British
citizenship	UK
other names	Boz
notableworks	''Sketches by Boz'', ''The Old Curiosity Shop'', ''Oliver Twist'', ''Nicholas Nickleby'', ''Barnaby Rudge'', ''A Christmas Carol'', ''Martin Chuzzlewit'', ''A Tale of Two Cities'', ''David Copperfield'', ''Great Expectations'', ''Bleak House'', ''Little Dorrit'', ''Hard Times'', ''Our Mutual Friend'', ''The Pickwick Papers''
occupation	Writer
years active	1833–1870
spouse	Catherine Thomson Hogarth
children	Charles Dickens, Jr., Mary Dickens, Kate Perugini, Walter Landor Dickens, Francis Dickens, Alfred D'Orsay Tennyson Dickens, Sydney Smith Haldimand Dickens, Henry Fielding Dickens, Dora Annie Dickens, and Edward Dickens
parents	John DickensElizabeth Dickens
influences	William Shakespeare, The New Testament, Tobias Smollett, Henry Fielding, Miguel de Cervantes, William Wordsworth
influenced	William Makepeace Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allen Poe, Henry Longfellow, Henry James, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Gissing, G.K.Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw, Franz Kafka, T.S.Eliot, James Joyce, Diana Gabaldon
signature	Charles Dickens Signature.svg
footnotes	}}

Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic novels and characters.

Many of his writings were originally published serially, in monthly instalments, a format of publication which Dickens himself helped popularise. Unlike other authors who completed novels before serialisation, Dickens often created the episodes as they were being serialised. The practice lent his stories a particular rhythm, punctuated by cliffhangers to keep the public looking forward to the next instalment. The continuing popularity of his novels and short stories is such that they have never gone out of print.

Dickens's work has been highly praised for its realism, comedy, mastery of prose, unique personalities and concern for social reform by writers such as Leo Tolstoy, George Gissing and G.K. Chesterton; though others, such as Henry James and Virginia Woolf, have criticised it for sentimentality and implausibility.

Life

Early years

Charles Dickens was born at Landport, in Portsea, on February 7, 1812, the second of eight children, to John and Elizabeth Dickens. His father was a clerk in the Navy Pay-office and was temporarily on duty in the neighbourhood. Very soon after the birth of Charles, however, the family moved for a short period to Norfolk Street, Bloomsbury, and then for a long period to Chatham, in Kent, which thus became the real childhood home, and for all serious purposes, the native place of Dickens. His early years seem to have been idyllic, although he thought himself a "very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy". Charles spent time outdoors, but also read voraciously, especially the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding. He spoke, later in life, of his poignant memories of childhood, and of his near-photographic memory of the people and events, which he used in his writing. His father's brief period as a clerk in the Navy Pay Office afforded him a few years of private education at William Giles's School, in Chatham.

This period came to an abrupt end when the Dickens family, because of financial difficulties, moved from Kent to Camden Town, in London in 1822. John Dickens continually lived beyond his means and was eventually imprisoned in the Marshalsea debtor's prison in Southwark, London in 1824. Shortly afterwards, the rest of his family joined him – except 12-year-old Charles, who was boarded with family friend Elizabeth Roylance in Camden Town. Mrs. Roylance was "a reduced [impoverished] old lady, long known to our family", whom Dickens later immortalised, "with a few alterations and embellishments", as "Mrs. Pipchin", in ''Dombey and Son''. Later, he lived in a "back-attic...at the house of an insolvent-court agent...in Lant Street in The Borough...he was a fat, good-natured, kind old gentleman, with a quiet old wife"; and he had a very innocent grown-up son; these three were the inspiration for the Garland family in ''The Old Curiosity Shop''.

On Sundays, Dickens and his sister Frances ("Fanny") were allowed out from the Royal Academy of Music and spent the day at the Marshalsea. (Dickens later used the prison as a setting in ''Little Dorrit''). To pay for his board and to help his family, Dickens was forced to leave school and began working ten-hour days at Warren's Blacking Warehouse, on Hungerford Stairs, near the present Charing Cross railway station. He earned six shillings a week pasting labels on blacking. The strenuous – and often cruel – work conditions made a deep impression on Dickens, and later influenced his fiction and essays, forming the foundation of his interest in the reform of socio-economic and labour conditions, the rigors of which he believed were unfairly borne by the poor. He would later write that he wondered "how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age." As told to John Forster (from ''The Life of Charles Dickens''):

After only a few months in Marshalsea, John Dickens's paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Dickens, died and bequeathed him the sum of £450. On the expectation of this legacy, Dickens was granted release from prison. Under the Insolvent Debtors Act, Dickens arranged for payment of his creditors, and he and his family left Marshalsea for the home of Mrs. Roylance.

Although Charles eventually attended the Wellington House Academy in North London, his mother Elizabeth Dickens did not immediately remove him from the boot-blacking factory. The incident may have done much to confirm Dickens's view that a father should rule the family, a mother find her proper sphere inside the home. "I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back." His mother's failure to request his return was no doubt a factor in his dissatisfied attitude towards women.'

Righteous anger stemming from his own situation and the conditions under which working-class people lived became major themes of his works, and it was this unhappy period in his youth to which he alluded in his favourite, and most autobiographical, novel, ''David Copperfield'': "I had no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no assistance, no support, of any kind, from anyone, that I can call to mind, as I hope to go to heaven!" The Wellington House Academy was not a good school. 'Much of the haphazard, desultory teaching, poor discipline punctuated by the headmaster's sadistic brutality, the seedy ushers and general run-down atmosphere, are embodied in Mr. Creakle's Establishment in ''David Copperfield''.' Dickens worked at the law office of Ellis and Blackmore, attorneys, of Holborn Court, Gray's Inn, as a junior clerk from May 1827 to November 1828. Then, having learned Gurneys system of shorthand in his spare time, he left to become a freelance reporter. A distant relative, Thomas Charlton, was a freelance reporter at Doctors' Commons, and Dickens was able to share his box there to report the legal proceedings for nearly four years. This education informed works such as ''Nicholas Nickleby'', ''Dombey and Son'', and especially ''Bleak House''—whose vivid portrayal of the machinations and bureaucracy of the legal system did much to enlighten the general public, and was a vehicle for dissemination of Dickens's own views regarding, particularly, the heavy burden on the poor who were forced by circumstances to "go to law".

In 1830, Dickens met his first love, Maria Beadnell, thought to have been the model for the character Dora in ''David Copperfield''. Maria's parents disapproved of the courtship and effectively ended the relationship by sending her to school in Paris.

Journalism and early novels

In 1833 Dickens's first story, ''A Dinner at Poplar Walk'' was published in the London periodical, ''Monthly Magazine''. The following year he rented rooms at Furnival's Inn becoming a political journalist, reporting on parliamentary debate and travelling across Britain to cover election campaigns for the ''Morning Chronicle''. His journalism, in the form of sketches in periodicals, formed his first collection of pieces ''Sketches by Boz'', published in 1836. This led to the serialisation of his first novel, ''The Pickwick Papers'', in March 1836. He continued to contribute to and edit journals throughout his literary career.

In 1836 Dickens accepted the job of editor of ''Bentley's Miscellany'', a position he held for three years, until he fell out with the owner. At the same time, his success as a novelist continued, producing ''Oliver Twist'' (1837–39), ''Nicholas Nickleby'' (1838–39), ''The Old Curiosity Shop'' and, finally, ''Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty'' as part of the ''Master Humphrey's Clock'' series (1840–41)—all published in monthly instalments before being made into books. During this period Dickens kept a pet raven named Grip, which he had stuffed when it died in 1841. (It is now at the Free Library of Philadelphia).

On 2 April 1836, he married Catherine Thomson Hogarth (1816–1879), the daughter of George Hogarth, editor of the ''Evening Chronicle''. After a brief honeymoon in Chalk, Kent, they set up home in Bloomsbury. They had ten children:

Charles Culliford Boz Dickens (C. C. B. Dickens), later known as Charles Dickens, Jr.

Mary Dickens

Kate Macready Dickens

Walter Landor Dickens

Francis Jeffrey Dickens

Alfred D'Orsay Tennyson Dickens

Sydney Smith Haldimand Dickens

Sir Henry Fielding Dickens

Dora Annie Dickens

Edward Dickens

Dickens and his family lived at 48 Doughty Street, London, (on which he had a three year lease at £80 a year) from 25 March 1837 until December 1839. Dickens's younger brother Frederick and Catherine's 17-year-old sister Mary moved in with them. Dickens became very attached to Mary, and she died in his arms after a brief illness in 1837. She became a character in many of his books, and her death is fictionalised as the death of Nell in ''The Old Curiosity Shop''.

First visit to America

During his visit, Dickens spent a month in New York City, giving lectures, raising support for copyright laws, and recording many of his impressions of America. He met such luminaries as Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant. On 14 February 1842, a Boz Ball was held in his honour at the Park Theater, with 3,000 guests. Among the neighbourhoods he visited were Five Points, Wall Street, The Bowery, and the prison known as The Tombs. At this time Georgina Hogarth, another sister of Catherine, joined the Dickens household, now living at Devonshire Terrace, Marylebone, to care for the young family they had left behind. She remained with them as housekeeper, organiser, adviser and friend until Dickens's death in 1870.

Shortly thereafter, he began to show interest in Unitarian Christianity, although he remained an Anglican for the rest of his life. Soon after his return to England, Dickens began work on the first of his two or three famous Yuletide tales ''A Christmas Carol'' written in 1843, which was followed by The Chimes in 1844 and The Cricket on the Hearth in 1845. Of these "A Christmas Carol" was most popular and it did much to rekindle the joy of Christmas in Britain and America when the traditional celebration of Christmas was in decline. The seeds for the story were planted in Dickens's mind during a trip to Manchester to witness conditions of the manufacturing workers there. This, along with scenes he had recently witnessed at the Field Lane Ragged School, caused Dickens to resolve to "strike a sledge hammer blow" for the poor. As the idea for the story took shape and the writing began in earnest, Dickens became engrossed in the book. He wrote that as the tale unfolded he "wept and laughed, and wept again' as he 'walked about the black streets of London fifteen or twenty miles many a night when all sober folks had gone to bed." After living briefly abroad in Italy (1844) Dickens travelled to Switzerland (1846), it was here he began work on ''Dombey and Son'' (1846–48). This and ''David Copperfield'' (1849–50) marks a significant artistic break in Dickens's career as his novels became more serious in theme and more carefully planned than his early works.

Philanthropy

In May 1846 Angela Burdett Coutts, heir to the Coutts banking fortune, approached Dickens about setting up a home for the redemption of "fallen" women. Coutts envisioned a home that would differ from existing institutions, which offered harsh and punishing regimes for these women, and instead provide an environment where they could learn to read and write and become proficient in domestic household chores so as to re-integrate them into society. After initially resisting, Dickens eventually founded the home, named "Urania Cottage", in the Lime Grove section of Shepherds Bush. He became involved in many aspects of its day-to-day running, setting the house rules, reviewing the accounts and interviewing prospective residents, some of whom became characters in his books. He would scour prisons and workhouses for potentially suitable candidates and relied on friends, such as the Magistrate John Hardwick, to bring them to his attention. Each potential candidate was given a printed invitation written by Dickens called ‘An Appeal to Fallen Women’, which he signed only as ‘Your friend’. If the woman accepted the invitation, Dickens would personally interview her for admission. All of the women were required to emigrate following their time at Urania Cottage. In research published in 2009, the families of two of these women were identified, one in Canada and one in Australia. It is estimated that about 100 women graduated between 1847 and 1859.

Middle years

left|thumb|Photograph of the author, c. 1850thumb|right|200px|Dickens painted by Ary Scheffer, 1855. Dickens wrote to John Forster of the experience: "I can scarcely express how uneasy and unsettled it makes me to sit, sit, sit, with ''Little Dorrit'' on my mind." In late November 1851, Dickens moved into Tavistock House where he would write ''Bleak House'' (1852–53), ''Hard Times'' (1854) and ''Little Dorrit'' (1857). It was here he indulged in the amateur theatricals which are described in Forster's "Life". In 1856, the income he was earning from his writing allowed him to buy Gad's Hill Place in Higham, Kent. As a child, Dickens had walked past the house and dreamed of living in it. The area was also the scene of some of the events of Shakespeare's ''Henry IV, Part 1'' and this literary connection pleased him.

In 1857, Dickens hired professional actresses for the play ''The Frozen Deep'', which he and his protégé Wilkie Collins had written. Dickens formed a bond with one of the actresses, Ellen Ternan, which was to last the rest of his life. He then separated from his wife, Catherine, in 1858 – divorce was still unthinkable for someone as famous as he was.

During this period, whilst pondering about giving public readings for his own profit, Dickens was approached by Great Ormond Street Hospital to help it survive its first major financial crisis through a charitable appeal. Dickens, whose philanthropy was well-known, was asked to preside by his friend, the hospital's founder Charles West and he threw himself into the task, heart and soul (a little known fact is that Dickens reported anonymously in the weekly ''The Examiner'' in 1849 to help mishandled children and wrote another article to help publicise the hospital's opening in 1852). On 9 February 1858, Dickens spoke at the hospital's first annual festival dinner at Freemasons' Hall and later gave a public reading of ''A Christmas Carol'' at St. Martin-in-the-Fields church hall. The events raised enough money to enable the hospital to purchase the neighbouring house, No. 48 Great Ormond Street, increasing the bed capacity from 20 to 75.

After separating from his wife in the summer of 1858 Dickens undertook his first series of public readings in London, which ended on 22 July. After 10 days rest, he began a gruelling and ambitious tour through the English provinces, Scotland and Ireland, beginning with a performance in Clifton on 2 August and closing in Brighton, more than three months later, on 13 November. Altogether he read eighty-seven times, on some days giving both a matinée and an evening performance. Major works, ''A Tale of Two Cities'' (1859); and ''Great Expectations'' (1861) soon followed and would prove resounding successes. During this time he was also the publisher and editor of, and a major contributor to, the journals ''Household Words'' (1850–1859) and ''All the Year Round'' (1858–1870).

In early September 1860, in a field behind Gad's Hill, Dickens made a great bonfire of almost his entire correspondence - only those letters on business matters were spared. Since Ellen Ternan also burned all of his letters to her, the extent of the affair between the two was unknown until the publication in 1939 of ''Dickens and Daughter'', a book about Dickens's relationship with his daughter Kate. Kate Dickens worked with author Gladys Storey on the book prior to her death in 1929, and alleged that Dickens and Ternan had a son who died in infancy, although no contemporary evidence exists. On his death, Dickens settled an annuity on Ternan which made her a financially independent woman. Claire Tomalin's book, ''The Invisible Woman'', set out to prove that Ternan lived with Dickens secretly for the last 13 years of his life. The book was subsequently turned into a play, ''Little Nell'', by Simon Gray.

In the same period, Dickens furthered his interest in the paranormal becoming one of the early members of The Ghost Club.

Franklin incident

A recurring theme in Dickens's writing reflected the public's interest in Arctic exploration. The heroic friendship between explorers John Franklin and John Richardson gave Dicken's the idea for ''A Tale of Two Cities'', ''The Wreck of the Golden Mary'' and the play ''The Frozen Deep''. After Franklin died in unexplained circumstances on an expedition to find the North West Passage, Dickens wrote a piece in ''Household Words'' defending his hero against the claim made in 1854 that recently discovered evidence showed that Franklin's men had, in their desperation, resorted to cannibalism. Without adducing any supporting evidence he speculated that, far from resorting to cannibalism amongst themselves, the members of the expedition may have been "set upon and slain by the Esquimaux ... We believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel." Although publishing a defence of the Esquimaux, written by John Rae, a member of one of Franklin's rescue parties who had actually visited the scene of the supposed cannibalism, in a subsequent issue of ''Household Words'', Dickens refused to alter his view.

Last years

On 9 June 1865, while returning from Paris with Ternan, Dickens was involved in the Staplehurst rail crash. The first seven carriages of the train plunged off a cast iron bridge under repair. The only first-class carriage to remain on the track was the one in which Dickens was travelling. Dickens tried to help the wounded and the dying before rescuers arrived. Before leaving, he remembered the unfinished manuscript for ''Our Mutual Friend'', and he returned to his carriage to retrieve it. Typically, Dickens later used this experience as material for his short ghost story ''The Signal-Man'' in which the central character has a premonition of his own death in a rail crash. He based the story around several previous rail accidents, such as the Clayton Tunnel rail crash of 1861.

Dickens managed to avoid an appearance at the inquest, to avoid disclosing that he had been travelling with Ternan and her mother, which would have caused a scandal. Although physically unharmed, Dickens never really recovered from the trauma of the Staplehurst crash, and his normally prolific writing shrank to completing ''Our Mutual Friend'' and starting the unfinished ''The Mystery of Edwin Drood''. Much of his time was taken up with public readings from his best-loved novels. Dickens was fascinated by the theatre as an escape from the world, and theatres and theatrical people appear in ''Nicholas Nickleby''. The travelling shows were extremely popular. In 1866, a series of public readings were undertaken in England and Scotland. The following year saw more readings in England and Ireland.

Second visit to America

On 9 November 1867, Dickens sailed from Liverpool for his second American reading tour. Landing at Boston, he devoted the rest of the month to a round of dinners with such notables as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his American publisher James Thomas Fields. In early December, the readings began and Dickens spent the month shuttling between Boston and New York. Although he had started to suffer from what he called the "true American catarrh", he kept to a schedule that would have challenged a much younger man, even managing to squeeze in some sleighing in Central Park. In New York, he gave twenty-two readings at Steinway Hall between 9 December 1867 and 18 April 1868, and four at Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims between 16 and 21 January 1868. During his travels, he saw a significant change in the people and the circumstances of America. His final appearance was at a banquet the American Press held in his honour at Delmonico's on 18 April, when he promised never to denounce America again. By the end of the tour, the author could hardly manage solid food, subsisting on champagne and eggs beaten in sherry. On 23 April, he boarded his ship to return to Britain, barely escaping a Federal Tax Lien against the proceeds of his lecture tour.

Farewell readings

Between 1868 and 1869, Dickens gave a series of "farewell readings" in England, Scotland, and Ireland, until he collapsed on 22 April 1869, at Preston in Lancashire showing symptoms of a mild stroke. After further provincial readings were cancelled, he began work on his final novel, ''The Mystery of Edwin Drood''. In an opium den in Shadwell, he witnessed an elderly pusher known as "Opium Sal", who subsequently featured in his mystery novel. When he had regained sufficient strength, Dickens arranged, with medical approval, for a final series of readings at least partially to make up to his sponsors what they had lost due of his illness. There were to be twelve performances, running between 11 January and 15 March 1870, the last taking place at 8:00 pm at St. James's Hall in London. Although in grave health by this time, he read ''A Christmas Carol'' and ''The Trial from Pickwick''. On 2 May, he made his last public appearance at a Royal Academy Banquet in the presence of the Prince and Princess of Wales, paying a special tribute to the passing of his friend, illustrator Daniel Maclise.

Death

On 8 June 1870, Dickens suffered another stroke at his home, after a full day's work on ''Edwin Drood''. The next day, on 9 June, and five years to the day after the Staplehurst rail crash 9 June 1865, he died at Gad's Hill Place, never having regained consciousness. Contrary to his wish to be buried at Rochester Cathedral "in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner," he was laid to rest in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. A printed epitaph circulated at the time of the funeral reads: "To the Memory of Charles Dickens (England's most popular author) who died at his residence, Higham, near Rochester, Kent, 9 June 1870, aged 58 years. He was a sympathiser with the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest writers is lost to the world." Dickens's last words, as reported in his obituary in The Times were alleged to have been:

On Sunday, 19 June 1870, five days after Dickens's interment in the Abbey, Dean Arthur Penrhyn Stanley delivered a memorial elegy, lauding "the genial and loving humorist whom we now mourn", for showing by his own example "that even in dealing with the darkest scenes and the most degraded characters, genius could still be clean, and mirth could be innocent." Pointing to the fresh flowers that adorned the novelist's grave, Stanley assured those present that "the spot would thenceforth be a sacred one with both the New World and the Old, as that of the representative of literature, not of this island only, but of all who speak our English tongue."

Dickens's will stipulated that no memorial be erected to honour him. The only life-size bronze statue of Dickens, cast in 1891 by Francis Edwin Elwell, is located in Clark Park in the Spruce Hill neighbourhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the United States. The couch on which he died is preserved at the Dickens Birthplace Museum in Portsmouth.

Literary style

Dickens loved the style of the 18th century picturesque or Gothic romance novels, although it had already become a target for parody. One "character" vividly drawn throughout his novels is London itself. From the coaching inns on the outskirts of the city to the lower reaches of the Thames, all aspects of the capital are described over the course of his body of work.

His writing style is florid and poetic, with a strong comic touch. His satires of British aristocratic snobbery—he calls one character the "Noble Refrigerator"—are often popular. Comparing orphans to stocks and shares, people to tug boats, or dinner-party guests to furniture are just some of Dickens's acclaimed flights of fancy. Many of his characters' names provide the reader with a hint as to the roles played in advancing the storyline, such as Mr. Murdstone in the novel David Copperfield, which is clearly a combination of "murder" and stony coldness. His literary style is also a mixture of fantasy and realism.

Characters

Dickens is famed for his depiction of the hardships of the working class, his intricate plots, and his sense of humour. But he is perhaps most famed for the characters he created. His novels were heralded early in his career for their ability to capture the everyday man and thus create characters to whom readers could relate. Beginning with ''The Pickwick Papers'' in 1836, Dickens wrote numerous novels, each uniquely filled with believable personalities and vivid physical descriptions. Dickens's friend and biographer, John Forster, said that Dickens made "characters real existences, not by describing them but by letting them describe themselves."

Dickensian characters—especially their typically whimsical names—are among the most memorable in English literature. The likes of Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Jacob Marley, Bob Cratchit, Oliver Twist, The Artful Dodger, Fagin, Bill Sikes, Pip, Miss Havisham, Charles Darnay, David Copperfield, Mr. Micawber, Abel Magwitch, Daniel Quilp, Samuel Pickwick, Wackford Squeers, Uriah Heep and many others are so well known and can be believed to be living a life outside the novels that their stories have been continued by other authors.

The author worked closely with his illustrators supplying them with a summary of the work at the outset and thus ensuring that his characters and settings were exactly how he envisioned them. He would brief the illustrator on plans for each month's instalment so that work could begin before he wrote them. Marcus Stone, illustrator of ''Our Mutual Friend'', recalled that the author was always "ready to describe down to the minutest details the personal characteristics, and ... life-history of the creations of his fancy." This close working relationship is important to readers of Dickens today. The illustrations give us a glimpse of the characters as Dickens described them. Film makers still use the illustrations as a basis for characterisation, costume, and set design.

Often these characters were based on people he knew. In a few instances Dickens based the character too closely on the original, as in the case of Harold Skimpole in ''Bleak House'', based on James Henry Leigh Hunt, and Miss Mowcher in ''David Copperfield'', based on his wife's dwarf chiropodist. Indeed, the acquaintances made when reading a Dickens novel are not easily forgotten. The author Virginia Woolf maintained that "we remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens" as he produces "characters who exist not in detail, not accurately or exactly, but abundantly in a cluster of wild yet extraordinarily revealing remarks."

Autobiographical elements

All authors might be said to incorporate autobiographical elements in their fiction, but with Dickens this is very noticeable, even though he took pains to mask what he considered his shameful, lowly past. ''David Copperfield'' is one of the most clearly autobiographical but the scenes from ''Bleak House'' of interminable court cases and legal arguments are drawn from the author's brief career as a court reporter. Dickens's own father was sent to prison for debt, and this became a common theme in many of his books, with the detailed depiction of life in the Marshalsea prison in ''Little Dorrit'' resulting from Dickens's own experiences of the institution. Childhood sweethearts in many of his books (such as Little Em'ly in ''David Copperfield'') may have been based on Dickens's own childhood infatuation with Lucy Stroughill. Dickens may have drawn on his childhood experiences, but he was also ashamed of them and would not reveal that this was where he gathered his realistic accounts of squalor. Very few knew the details of his early life until six years after his death when John Forster published a biography on which Dickens had collaborated.

Episodic writing

As noted above, most of Dickens's major novels were first written in monthly or weekly instalments in journals such as ''Master Humphrey's Clock'' and ''Household Words'', later reprinted in book form. These instalments made the stories cheap, accessible and the series of regular cliff-hangers made each new episode widely anticipated. American fans even waited at the docks in New York, shouting out to the crew of an incoming ship, "Is little Nell dead?" Part of Dickens's great talent was to incorporate this episodic writing style but still end up with a coherent novel at the end. The monthly numbers were illustrated by, amongst others, "Phiz" (a pseudonym for Hablot Browne). Among his best-known works are ''Great Expectations'', ''David Copperfield'', ''Oliver Twist'', ''A Tale of Two Cities'', ''Bleak House'', ''Nicholas Nickleby'', ''The Pickwick Papers'', and ''A Christmas Carol''.

Dickens's technique of writing in monthly or weekly instalments (depending on the work) can be understood by analysing his relationship with his illustrators. The several artists who filled this role were privy to the contents and intentions of Dickens's instalments before the general public. Thus, by reading these correspondences between author and illustrator, the intentions behind Dickens's work can be better understood. These also reveal how the interests of the reader and author do not coincide. A great example of that appears in the monthly novel ''Oliver Twist''. At one point in this work, Dickens had Oliver become embroiled in a robbery. That particular monthly instalment concludes with young Oliver being shot. Readers expected that they would be forced to wait only a month to find out the outcome of that gunshot. In fact, Dickens did not reveal what became of young Oliver in the succeeding number. Rather, the reading public was forced to wait ''two'' months to discover if the boy lived.

Another important impact of Dickens's episodic writing style resulted from his exposure to the opinions of his readers. Since Dickens did not write the chapters very far ahead of their publication, he was allowed to witness the public reaction and alter the story depending on those public reactions. A fine example of this process can be seen in his weekly serial ''The Old Curiosity Shop'', which is a chase story. In this novel, Nell and her grandfather are fleeing the villain Quilp. The progress of the novel follows the gradual success of that pursuit. As Dickens wrote and published the weekly instalments, his friend John Forster pointed out: "You know you're going to have to kill her, don't you?" Why this end was necessary can be explained by a brief analysis of the difference between the structure of a comedy versus a tragedy. In a comedy, the action covers a sequence "You think they're going to lose, you think they're going to lose, they win". In tragedy, it is: "You think they're going to win, you think they're going to win, they lose". The dramatic conclusion of the story is implicit throughout the novel. So, as Dickens wrote the novel in the form of a tragedy, the sad outcome of the novel was a foregone conclusion. If he had not caused his heroine to lose, he would not have completed his dramatic structure. Dickens admitted that his friend Forster was right and, in the end, Nell died.

Social commentary

Dickens's novels were, among other things, works of social commentary. He was a fierce critic of the poverty and social stratification of Victorian society. Dickens's second novel, ''Oliver Twist'' (1839), shocked readers with its images of poverty and crime and was responsible for the clearing of the actual London slum, Jacob's Island, that was the basis of the story. In addition, with the character of the tragic prostitute, Nancy, Dickens "humanised" such women for the reading public; women who were regarded as "unfortunates", inherently immoral casualties of the Victorian class/economic system. ''Bleak House'' and ''Little Dorrit'' elaborated expansive critiques of the Victorian institutional apparatus: the interminable lawsuits of the Court of Chancery that destroyed people's lives in ''Bleak House'' and a dual attack in ''Little Dorrit'' on inefficient, corrupt patent offices and unregulated market speculation.

Literary techniques

Dickens is often described as using 'idealised' characters and highly sentimental scenes to contrast with his caricatures and the ugly social truths he reveals. The story of Nell Trent in ''The Old Curiosity Shop'' (1841) was received as incredibly moving by contemporary readers but viewed as ludicrously sentimental by Oscar Wilde. "You would need to have a heart of stone", he declared in one of his famous witticisms, "not to laugh at the death of little Nell." (although her death actually takes place off-stage). In 1903 G. K. Chesterton said, "It is not the death of little Nell, but the life of little Nell, that I object to."

In ''Oliver Twist'' Dickens provides readers with an idealised portrait of a boy so inherently and unrealistically 'good' that his values are never subverted by either brutal orphanages or coerced involvement in a gang of young pickpockets. While later novels also centre on idealised characters (Esther Summerson in ''Bleak House'' and Amy Dorrit in ''Little Dorrit''), this idealism serves only to highlight Dickens's goal of poignant social commentary. Many of his novels are concerned with social realism, focusing on mechanisms of social control that direct people's lives (for instance, factory networks in ''Hard Times'' and hypocritical exclusionary class codes in ''Our Mutual Friend'').Dickens also employs incredible coincidences (e.g., Oliver Twist turns out to be the lost nephew of the upper class family that randomly rescues him from the dangers of the pickpocket group). Such coincidences are a staple of eighteenth century picaresque novels such as Henry Fielding's ''Tom Jones'' that Dickens enjoyed so much. But, to Dickens, these were not just plot devices but an index of the humanism that led him to believe that good wins out in the end and often in unexpected ways.

Legacy

A well-known personality, his novels proved immensely popular during his lifetime. His first full novel, ''The Pickwick Papers'' (1837), brought him immediate fame, and this success continued throughout his career. Although rarely departing greatly from his typical "Dickensian" method of always attempting to write a great "story" in a somewhat conventional manner (the dual narrators of ''Bleak House'' constitute a notable exception), he experimented with varied themes, characterisations, and genres. Some of these experiments achieved more popularity than others, and the public's taste and appreciation of his many works have varied over time. Usually keen to give his readers what they wanted, the monthly or weekly publication of his works in episodes meant that the books could change as the story proceeded at the whim of the public. Good examples of this are the American episodes in ''Martin Chuzzlewit'' which Dickens included in response to lower-than-normal sales of the earlier chapters. Dickens continues to be one of the best known and most read of English authors, and his works have never gone out of print. At least 180 motion pictures and TV adaptations based on Dickens's works help confirm his success. Many of his works were adapted for the stage during his own lifetime and as early as 1913 a silent film of ''The Pickwick Papers'' was made. His characters were often so memorable that they took on a life of their own outside his books. Gamp became a slang expression for an umbrella from the character Mrs. Gamp and Pickwickian, Pecksniffian, and Gradgrind all entered dictionaries due to Dickens's original portraits of such characters who were quixotic, hypocritical, or emotionlessly logical. Sam Weller, the carefree and irreverent valet of ''The Pickwick Papers'', was an early superstar, perhaps better known than his author at first. It is likely that ''A Christmas Carol'' stands as his best-known story, with new adaptations almost every year. It is also the most-filmed of Dickens's stories, with many versions dating from the early years of cinema. This simple morality tale with both pathos and its theme of redemption, sums up (for many) the true meaning of Christmas. Indeed, it eclipses all other Yuletide stories in not only popularity, but in adding archetypal figures (Scrooge, Tiny Tim, the Christmas ghosts) to the Western cultural consciousness. A prominent phrase from the tale, '''Merry Christmas''', was popularised following the appearance of the story. The term Scrooge became a synonym for miser, with '''Bah! Humbug!''' dismissive of the festive spirit. Novelist William Makepeace Thackeray called the book "a national benefit, and to every man and woman who reads it a personal kindness". Some historians claim the book significantly redefined the "spirit" and importance of Christmas, and initiated a rebirth of seasonal merriment after Puritan authorities in 17th century England and America suppressed pagan rituals associated with the holiday. According to the historian Ronald Hutton, the current state of the observance of Christmas is largely the result of a mid-Victorian revival of the holiday spearheaded by ''A Christmas Carol''. Dickens sought to construct Christmas as a family-centred festival of generosity, in contrast to the community-based and church-centred observations, the observance of which had dwindled during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Superimposing his secular vision of the holiday, Dickens influenced many aspects of Christmas that are celebrated today among Western nations, such as family gatherings, seasonal food and drink, dancing, games, and a festive generosity of spirit. ''A Christmas Carol'' rejuvenated his career as a renowned author. ''A Tale of Two Cities'' is Dickens best selling novel. Since its inaugural publication in 1859, the novel has sold over 200 million copies, and is among the most famous works of fiction.

At a time when Britain was the major economic and political power of the world, Dickens highlighted the life of the forgotten poor and disadvantaged within society. Through his journalism he campaigned on specific issues—such as sanitation and the workhouse—but his fiction probably demonstrated its greatest prowess in changing public opinion in regard to class inequalities. He often depicted the exploitation and oppression of the poor and condemned the public officials and institutions that not only allowed such abuses to exist, but flourished as a result. His most strident indictment of this condition is in ''Hard Times'' (1854), Dickens's only novel-length treatment of the industrial working class. In this work, he uses both vitriol and satire to illustrate how this marginalised social stratum was termed "Hands" by the factory owners; that is, not really "people" but rather only appendages of the machines that they operated. His writings inspired others, in particular journalists and political figures, to address such problems of class oppression. For example, the prison scenes in ''The Pickwick Papers'' are claimed to have been influential in having the Fleet Prison shut down. As Karl Marx said, Dickens, and the other novelists of Victorian England, "...issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together...". The exceptional popularity of his novels, even those with socially oppositional themes (''Bleak House'', 1853; ''Little Dorrit'', 1857; ''Our Mutual Friend'', 1865) underscored not only his almost preternatural ability to create compelling storylines and unforgettable characters, but also ensured that the Victorian public confronted issues of social justice that had commonly been ignored.

His fiction, with often vivid descriptions of life in nineteenth century England, has inaccurately and anachronistically come to symbolise on a global level Victorian society (1837 – 1901) as uniformly "Dickensian", when in fact, his novels' time span spanned from the 1770s to the 1860s. In the decade following his death in 1870, a more intense degree of socially and philosophically pessimistic perspectives invested British fiction; such themes stood in marked contrast to the religious faith that ultimately held together even the bleakest of Dickens's novels. Dickens clearly influenced later Victorian novelists such as Thomas Hardy and George Gissing; their works display a greater willingness to confront and challenge the Victorian institution of religion. They also portray characters caught up by social forces (primarily via lower-class conditions), but they usually steered them to tragic ends beyond their control.

Novelists continue to be influenced by his books; for instance, such disparate current writers as Anne Rice, Tom Wolfe, and John Irving evidence direct Dickensian connections. Humorist James Finn Garner even wrote a tongue-in-cheek "politically correct" version of ''A Christmas Carol'', and other affectionate parodies include the Radio 4 comedy ''Bleak Expectations''. Matthew Pearl's novel ''The Last Dickens'' is a thriller about how Charles Dickens would have ended ''The Mystery of Edwin Drood''. In the UK survey entitled ''The Big Read'' carried out by the BBC in 2003, five of Dickens's books were named in the Top 100, featuring alongside Terry Pratchett with the most.

Although Dickens's life has been the subject of at least two TV miniseries, a television film ''The Great Inimitable Mr. Dickens'' in which he was portrayed by Anthony Hopkins, and two famous one-man shows, he has never been the subject of a Hollywood big screen biography.

Claims of anti-Semitism and racism

Paul Vallely writes in ''The Independent'' that Dickens's Fagin in ''Oliver Twist'' —the Jew who runs a school in London for child pickpockets—is widely seen as one of the most grotesque Jews in English literature, and the most vivid of Dickens's 989 characters.

The character is thought to have been partly based on Ikey Solomon, a 19th century Jewish criminal in London, who was interviewed by Dickens during the latter's time as a journalist. Nadia Valdman, who writes about the portrayal of Jews in literature, argues that Fagin's representation was drawn from the image of the Jew as inherently evil, that the imagery associated him with the Devil, and with beasts.

The novel refers to Fagin 257 times in the first 38 chapters as "the Jew", while the ethnicity or religion of the other characters is rarely mentioned. In 1854, the ''Jewish Chronicle'' asked why "Jews alone should be excluded from the 'sympathizing heart' of this great author and powerful friend of the oppressed." Eliza Davis, whose husband had purchased Dickens's home in 1860 when he had put it up for sale, wrote to Dickens in protest at his portrayal of Fagin, arguing that he had "encouraged a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew", and that he had done a great wrong to the Jewish people. Dickens had described her husband at the time of the sale as a "Jewish moneylender", though also someone he came to know as an honest gentleman.

Surprisingly, Dickens took her complaint seriously. He halted the printing of ''Oliver Twist'', and changed the text for the parts of the book that had not been set, which is why Fagin is called "the Jew" 257 times in the first 38 chapters, but barely at all in the next 179 references to him. In his novel, ''Our Mutual Friend'', he created the character of Riah (meaning "friend" in Hebrew), whose goodness, Vallely writes, is almost as complete as Fagin's evil. Riah says in the novel: "Men say, 'This is a bad Greek, but there are good Greeks. This is a bad Turk, but there are good Turks.' Not so with the Jews ... they take the worst of us as samples of the best ..." Davis sent Dickens a copy of the Hebrew bible in gratitude.

Dickens's attitudes towards blacks were also complex, although he fiercely opposed the inhumanity of slavery in the United States, and expressed a desire for African American emancipation. In ''American Notes'', he includes a comic episode with a black coach driver, presenting a grotesque description focused on the man's dark complexion and way of movement, which to Dickens amounts to an "insane imitation of an English coachman". In 1868, alluding to the then poor intellectual condition of the black population in America, Dickens railed against "the mechanical absurdity of giving these people votes", which "at any rate at present, would glare out of every roll of their eyes, chuckle in their mouths, and bump in their heads."

In ''The Perils of Certain English Prisoners'' Dickens offers an allegory of the Indian Mutiny, where the "native Sambo", a paradigm of the Indian mutineers, is a "double-dyed traitor, and a most infernal villain" who takes part in a massacre of women and children, in an allusion to the Cawnpore Massacre. Dickens was much incensed by the massacre, in which over a hundred English prisoners, most of them women and children, were killed, and on 4 October 1857 wrote in a private letter to Baroness Burdett-Coutts: "I wish I were the Commander in Chief in India. ... I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested ... proceeding, with all convenient dispatch and merciful swiftness of execution, to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the earth."

''Perils'' greatly influenced the cultural reaction from English writers to the mutiny, by attributing guilt so as to portray the British as victims, and the Indians as villains. Wilkie Collins, who co-wrote ''Perils'', deviates from Dickens's view, writing the second chapter from a different perspective which, quoting poet Jaya Mehta, was "parodying British racism, instead of promoting it". Contemporary literary critic Arthur Quiller-Couch praised Dickens for eschewing any real-life depiction of the incident, for fear of inflaming his "raging mad" readership further, in favour of a romantic story "empty of racial or propagandist hatred". A modern inference is that it was his son's position in India, there on military service, at the mercy of inept imperial leaders who misunderstood conquered people, that may have influenced his reluctance to set ''Perils'' in India, for fear that his criticism may antagonise the son's superiors.

Names: 'Dickens' and 'Boz'

Charles Dickens had, as a contemporary critic put it, a "queer name". The name Dickens was used in interjective exclamations like "What the Dickens!" as a substitute for "devil". It was recorded in the OED as originating from Shakespeare's ''The Merry Wives of Windsor''. It was also used in the phrase "to play the Dickens" in the meaning "to play havoc/mischief".

'Boz' was Dickens's occasional pen-name, but was a familiar name in the Dickens household long before Charles became a famous author. It was actually taken from his youngest brother Augustus Dickens' family nickname 'Moses', given to him in honour of one of the brothers in ''The Vicar of Wakefield'' (one of the most widely read novels during the early 19th century). When playfully pronounced through the nose 'Moses' became 'Boses', and was later shortened to 'Boz' – pronounced through the nose with a long vowel 'o'.

Siblings

Frances (Fanny) Elizabeth Dickens 1810–1848

Letitia Dickens 1816–1893

Harriet Dickens 1819–1824

Frederick Dickens

Alfred Lamert Dickens

Augustus Newnham Dickens

Adaptations of readings

There have been several performances of Dickens readings by Emlyn Williams, Bransby Williams, Clive Francis performing the John Mortimer adaptation of ''A Christmas Carol'' and also Simon Callow in the ''Mystery of Charles Dickens'' by Peter Ackroyd. Entertainer Mike Randall re-enacts Dickens's readings (in character as Dickens) for a series of shows known as "Charles Dickens Presents A Christmas Carol," primarily in his home region in Western New York.

Museums and festivals

There are museums and festivals celebrating Dickens's life and works in many of the towns with which he was associated.

The Charles Dickens Museum, in Doughty Street, Holborn is the only one of Dickens's London homes to survive. He lived there only two years but in that time wrote ''The Pickwick Papers'', ''Oliver Twist'' and ''Nicholas Nickleby''. It contains a major collection of manuscripts, original furniture and memorabilia.

Charles Dickens Birthplace Museum in Portsmouth is the house in which Dickens was born. It has been re-furnished in the likely style of 1812 and contains Dickens memorabilia.

The Dickens House Museum in Broadstairs, Kent is the house of Miss Mary Pearson Strong, the basis for Miss Betsey Trotwood in ''David Copperfield''. It is visible across the bay from the original Bleak House (also a museum until 2005) where ''David Copperfield'' was written. The museum contains memorabilia, general Victoriana and some of Dickens's letters. Broadstairs has held a Dickens Festival annually since 1937.

The Victoria and Albert Museum holds the original manuscripts for many of his novels, plus printers' proofs, first editions, and illustrations. At least one of the manuscripts is usually on display in the Museum's British Galleries. The Charles Dickens Centre in Eastgate House, Rochester, closed in 2004, but the garden containing the author's Swiss chalet is still open. The 16th century house, which appeared as Westgate House in ''The Pickwick Papers'' and the Nun's House in ''Edwin Drood'', is now used as a wedding venue. The city's annual Dickens Festival (summer) and Dickensian Christmas celebrations continue unaffected. ''Summer Dickens'' is held at the end of May or in the first few days of June, it commences with an invitation only ball on the Thursday and then continues with street entertainment, and many costumed characters, on the Friday, Saturday and Sunday. ''Christmas Dickens'' is the first weekend in December- Saturday and Sunday only. Dickens World themed attraction, covering , and including a cinema and restaurants, opened in Chatham on 25 May 2007. It stands on a small part of the site of the former naval dockyard where Dickens's father had once worked in the Navy Pay Office.

To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens in 2012 the Museum of London hosts the UK's first major exhibition on the author for 40 years. Dickens and London opens on 9 December 2011 and is on until 10 June 2012.

Dickens festivals are also held across the world. Four notable ones in the United States are:

The Riverside Dickens Festival in Riverside, California, includes literary studies as well as entertainments.

The Great Dickens Christmas Fair has been held in San Francisco, California, since the 1970s. During the four or five weekends before Christmas, over 500 costumed performers mingle with and entertain thousands of visitors amidst the recreated full-scale blocks of Dickensian London in over of public area. This is the oldest, largest, and most successful of the modern Dickens festivals outside England. Many (including the Martin Harris who acts in the Rochester festival and flies out from London to play Scrooge every year in SF) say it is the most impressive in the world.

Dickens on The Strand in Galveston, Texas, is a holiday festival held on the first weekend in December since 1974, where bobbies, Beefeaters and the "Queen" herself are on hand to recreate the Victorian London of Charles Dickens. Many festival volunteers and attendees dress in Victorian attire and bring the world of Dickens to life.

The Greater Port Jefferson-Northern Brookhaven Arts Council holds a Dickens Festival in the Village of Port Jefferson, New York each year. In 2009, the Dickens Festival was 4 December, 5 and 6 December. It includes many events, along with a troupe of street performers who bring an authentic Dickensian atmosphere to the town.

Other memorials

Charles Dickens was commemorated on the Series E £10 note issued by the Bank of England which was in circulation in the UK between 1992 and 2003. Dickens appeared on the reverse of the note accompanied by a scene from ''The Pickwick Papers''.

Notable works

Charles Dickens published over a dozen major novels, a large number of short stories (including a number of Christmas-themed stories), a handful of plays, and several non-fiction books. Dickens's novels were initially serialised in weekly and monthly magazines, then reprinted in standard book formats.

Novels

{| |- | valign="top" | ''The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club'' (Monthly serial, April 1836 to November 1837)

''The Adventures of Oliver Twist'' (Monthly serial in ''Bentley's Miscellany'', February 1837 to April 1839)

''The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby'' (Monthly serial, April 1838 to October 1839)

''The Old Curiosity Shop'' (Weekly serial in ''Master Humphrey's Clock'', 25 April 1840, to 6 February 1841)

''Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty'' (Weekly serial in ''Master Humphrey's Clock'', 13 February 1841, to 27 November 1841)

The Christmas books:

* ''A Christmas Carol'' (1843)

* ''The Chimes'' (1844)

* ''The Cricket on the Hearth'' (1845)

* ''The Battle of Life'' (1846)

* ''The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain'' (1848)

''The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit'' (Monthly serial, January 1843 to July 1844)

| valign="top" |

''Dombey and Son'' (Monthly serial, October 1846 to April 1848)

''David Copperfield'' (Monthly serial, May 1849 to November 1850)

''Bleak House'' (Monthly serial, March 1852 to September 1853)

''Hard Times: For These Times'' (Weekly serial in ''Household Words'', 1 April 1854, to 12 August 1854)

''Little Dorrit'' (Monthly serial, December 1855 to June 1857)

''A Tale of Two Cities'' (Weekly serial in ''All the Year Round'', 30 April 1859, to 26 November 1859)

''Great Expectations'' (Weekly serial in ''All the Year Round'', 1 December 1860 to 3 August 1861)

''Our Mutual Friend'' (Monthly serial, May 1864 to November 1865)

''The Mystery of Edwin Drood'' (Monthly serial, April 1870 to September 1870. Only six of twelve planned numbers completed)

|}

Short story collections

''Sketches by Boz'' (1836)

''The Mudfog Papers'' (1837) in ''Bentley's Miscellany'' magazine

''Reprinted Pieces'' (1861)

''The Uncommercial Traveller'' (1860–1869)

{| |- | valign="top" | Christmas numbers of ''Household Words'' magazine:

''What Christmas Is, as We Grow Older'' (1851)

''A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire'' (1852)

''Another Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire'' (1853)

''The Seven Poor Travellers'' (1854)

''The Holly-Tree Inn'' (1855)

''The Wreck of the "Golden Mary"'' (1856)

''The Perils of Certain English Prisoners'' (1857)

''A House to Let'' (1858)

| valign="top" | Christmas numbers of ''All the Year Round'' magazine:

''The Haunted House'' (1859)

''A Message From the Sea'' (1860)

''Tom Tiddler's Ground'' (1861)

''Somebody's Luggage'' (1862)

''Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings'' (1863)

''Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy'' (1864)

''Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions'' (1865)

''Mugby Junction'' (1866)

''No Thoroughfare'' (1867)

|}

Selected non-fiction, poetry, and plays

{| |- | valign="top" |

''The Village Coquettes'' (Plays, 1836)

''The Fine Old English Gentleman'' (poetry, 1841)

''Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi'' (1838)

''American Notes: For General Circulation'' (1842)

''Pictures from Italy'' (1846)

| valign="top" |

''The Life of Our Lord: As written for his children'' (1849)

''A Child's History of England'' (1853)

''The Frozen Deep'' (play, 1857)

''Speeches, Letters and Sayings'' (1870)

|}

Notes

References

''A Charles Dickens Devotional''. Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2011. ISBN 978-1-4003-1954-1.

Ackroyd, Peter, ''Dickens'', (2002), Vintage, ISBN 0099437090

Drabble, Margaret (ed.), ''The Oxford Companion to English Literature'', (1997), Oxford University Press

Glavin, John. (ed.) ''Dickens on Screen'',(2003), New York: Cambridge University Press.

Kaplan, Fred. ''Dickens: A Biography'' William Morros, 1988

Lewis, Peter R. ''Disaster on the Dee: Robert Stephenson's Nemesis of 1847'', Tempus (2007) for a discussion of the Staplehurst accident, and its influence on Dickens.

Meckier, Jerome. ''Innocent Abroad: Charles Dickens' American Engagements'' University Press of Kentucky, 1990

Moss, Sidney P. ''Charles Dickens' Quarrel with America'' (New York: Whitson, 1984).

Patten, Robert L. (ed.) ''The Pickwick Papers'' (Introduction), (1978), Penguin Books.

Slater, Michael. "Dickens, Charles John Huffam (1812 – 1870)", ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', Oxford University Press, Sept 2004

Slater, Michael. ''Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing'', 2009 New Haven/London: Yale University Press ISBN 978-0-300-11207-8

Further reading

Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert, "Becoming Dickens 'The Invention of a Novelist'", London: Harvard University Press, 2011

Johnson, Edgar, ''Charles Dickens: his tragedy and triumph'', New York : Simon and Schuster, 1952. In two volumes.

Tomalin, Claire, ''Charles Dickens: A Life'', Penguin Press HC, The, 2011.

External links

Works

, HTML and plain text versions.

Works by or about Charles Dickens at Internet Archive and Google Books. Scanned books.

Works by Charles Dickens at EveryAuthor, HTML versions.

Works by Charles Dickens at Dickens Literature, HTML versions.

Works by Charles Dickens at Penn State University Electronic Classics Series, PDF versions.

Organizations and portals

The Dickens Fellowship, an international society dedicated to the study of Dickens and his Writings

David Perdue's Charles Dickens Page

A Dickens web page, portal.

The Dickens Page, portal.

Gad's Hill Place, Dickens information.

Museums

Dickens Museum Situated in a former Dickens House, 48 Doughty Street, London, WC1

Dickens Museum Virtual Tour

Dickens Birthplace Museum Old Commercial Road, Portsmouth

Victoria and Albert Museum The V&A;'s collections relating to Dickens

Other

A Charles Dickens Journal Timeline of Dickens's Life

David Perdue's Charles Dickens Page – Dickens's London (Interactive Map)

Hints to Collectors of Original Editions (1885)

Category:1812 births Category:1870 deaths Category:19th-century English people Category:19th-century novelists Category:British newspaper founders Category:Burials at Westminster Abbey Category:English Anglicans Category:English historical novelists Category:English journalists Category:English novelists Category:English prisoners and detainees Category:English short story writers Category:People associated with the Royal Society of Arts Category:People from Camden Town Category:People from Chatham, Kent Category:People from Portsmouth Category:Writers from London Category:People illustrated on sterling banknotes Category:Victorian novelists

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Uncle Tom is a derogatory term for a person of a low status group who is overly subservient with authority, or a black person who behaves in a subservient manner to white people.

The term comes from the title character of Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel ''Uncle Tom's Cabin''. Critical and popular views of both the character and the novel have shifted over time, leading to a shift in the term's use.

Original characterization and critical evaluations

At the time of the novel's initial publication in 1851 Uncle Tom was a rejection of the existing stereotypes of minstrel shows; Stowe's melodramatic story humanized the suffering of slavery for White audiences by portraying Tom as a Christlike figure who is ultimately martyred, beaten to death by a cruel master because Tom refuses to betray the whereabouts of two women who escape from slavery. Stowe reversed the gender conventions of slave narratives by juxtaposing Uncle Tom's feminine passivity against the brave daring of three African American women who escape from slavery.

The novel was very influential and commercially successful, first published in serial form in 1851-1852 and in book version from 1852 onward. An estimated 500,000 copies of the novel itself had sold in the United States and internationally by 1853, including unauthorized reprints. Senator Charles Sumner credited ''Uncle Tom's Cabin'' for the election of Abraham Lincoln and Lincoln himself reportedly quipped that Stowe had triggered the American Civil War. Frederick Douglass praised the novel as "a flash to light a million camp fires in front of the embattled hosts of slavery". Despite Douglass's enthusiasm, an anonymous 1852 reviewer for William Lloyd Garrison's publication ''The Liberator'' suspected a racial double standard in the idealization of Uncle Tom:

:Uncle Tom’s character is sketched with great power and rare religious perception. It triumphantly exemplifies the nature, tendency, and results of CHRISTIAN NON-RESISTANCE. We are curious to know whether Mrs. Stowe is a believer in the duty of non-resistance for the White man, under all possible outrage and peril, as for the Black man… [For whites in parallel circumstances, it is often said] Talk not of overcoming evil with good—it is madness! Talk not of peacefully submitting to chains and stripes—it is base servility! Talk not of servants being obedient to their masters—let the blood of tyrants flow! How is this to be explained or reconciled? Is there one law of submission and non-resistance for the Black man, and another of rebellion and conflict for the white man? When it is the whites who are trodden in the dust, does Christ justify them in taking up arms to vindicate their rights? And when it is the blacks who are thus treated, does Christ require them to be patient, harmless, long-suffering, and forgiving? Are there two Christs?

James Weldon Johnson, a prominent figure of the Harlem Renaissance, expresses an ambivalent opinion in his autobiography:

:For my part, I was never an admirer of Uncle Tom, nor of his type of goodness; but I believe that there were lots of old Negroes as foolishly good as he; the proof of which is that they knowingly stayed and worked on the plantations that furnished sinews for the army which was fighting to keep them enslaved.”

In 1949 American writer James Baldwin rejected the emasculation of the title character "robbed of his humanity and divested of his sex" as the price of spiritual salvation for a dark-skinned man in a fiction whose African-American characters, in Baldwin's view, were invariably two dimensional stereotypes. To Baldwin, Stowe was closer to a pamphleteer than a novelist and her artistic vision was fatally marred by polemics and racism that manifested especially in her handling of the title character. Stowe had stated that her sons had wept when she first read them the scene of Uncle Tom's death, but after Baldwin's essay it ceased being respectable to accept the melodrama of the Uncle Tom story. Uncle Tom became what critic Linda Williams describes as "an epithet of servility" and the novel's reputation plummeted until feminist critics led by Jane Tompkins reassessed the tale's female characters. According to Debra J. Rosenthal in an introduction to a collection of critical appraisals for the ''Routledge Literary Sourcebook on Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin'', overall reactions have been mixed with some critics praising the novel for affirming the humanity of the African American characters and for the risks Stowe assumed in taking a very public stand against slavery before abolitionism had become a socially acceptable cause, and others criticizing the very limited terms upon which those characters' humanity was affirmed and the artistic shortcomings of political melodrama.

Inspiration

A specific impetus for the novel was the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which imposed heavy fines upon law enforcement personnel in Northern states if they refused to assist the return of people who escaped from slavery. The new law also stripped African Americans of the right to request a jury trial or to testify on their own behalf, even if they were legally free, whenever a single claimant presented a sworn affidavit of ownership. The same law authorized a $1000 fine and six months imprisonment for anyone who knowingly harbored or assisted a fugitive slave. These terms infuriated Stowe, so the novel was written, read, and debated as a political abolitionist tract.

Stowe drew inspiration for the Uncle Tom character from several sources. The best-known of these was Josiah Henson, whose autobiography was originally published in 1849 and later republished in extensively revised editions after the publication of ''Uncle Tom's Cabin''. Henson was enslaved at birth in 1789. He became a Christian at age eighteen and took up preaching. Henson attempted to purchase his freedom for $450, but after selling his personal assets to raise $350 and signing a promissory note for the remainder Henson's owner raised the price to $1000; Henson was unable to prove that the original agreement had been for a lesser amount. Shortly afterward Henson was ordered on a trip south to New Orleans, and when he learned that he was to be sold there he obtained a weapon and contemplated murdering his white companions, but decided against violence because his Christian morals forbade it. A sudden illness in one of his companions forced their return to Kentucky, and shortly afterward Henson escaped north with his family, settling in Canada where he became a civic leader.

Stowe read the first edition of Henson's narrative and later confirmed that she had incorporated elements from it into ''Uncle Tom's Cabin''. Kentucky and New Orleans figure in both Henson's narrative and the novel's settings, and some other story elements are similar.

In the public imagination, however, Henson became synonymous with Uncle Tom. After Stowe's death her son and grandson claimed she and Henson had met before ''Uncle Tom's Cabin'' was written, but the chronology does not hold up to scrutiny and she probably drew material only from his published autobiography.

Minstrel stock character

Both the novel and its title character inspired numerous derivative works during the decade after its release, some of which lampooned and distorted the portrayal of the title character with politically loaded overtones. American copyright law before 1856 did not give novel authors any control over derivative stage adaptations, so Stowe neither approved the adaptations nor profited from them. Minstrel show retellings in particular, usually performed by white men in blackface, tended to be derisive and pro-slavery, transforming Uncle Tom from Christian martyr to a fool or an apologist for slavery.

Adapted theatrical performances of the novel remained in continual production in the United States for at least eighty years. These representations had a lasting cultural impact and influenced the pejorative nature of the term ''Uncle Tom'' in later popular use.

Although not all minstrel depictions of Uncle Tom were negative, the dominant version developed into a stock character very different from Stowe's hero. Stowe's Uncle Tom was a muscular and virile man who refused to obey when ordered to beat other slaves; the stock character of minstrel shows became a shuffling asexual individual with a receding hairline and graying hair. To Jo-Ann Morgan, author of ''Uncle Tom's Cabin as Visual Culture'', these shifting representations undermined the subversive layers of Stowe's original characterization by redefining Uncle Tom until he fit within prevailing racist norms. Particularly after the Civil War, as the political thrust of the novel which had arguably helped to precipitate that war became obsolete to actual political discourse, popular depictions of the title character recast him within the apologetics of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. The virile father of the abolitionist serial and first book edition degenerated into a decrepit old man, and with that transformation the character lost the capacity for resistance that had originally given meaning to his choices. Stowe never meant Uncle Tom to be a derided name, but the term as a pejorative has developed based on how later versions of the character, stripped of his strength, were depicted on stage.

Or as Claire Parfait, author of ''The Publishing History of Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1852-2002'' opines, the many alterations in retellings of the Uncle Tom story demonstrate an impulse to correct the retellers' perceptions of its flaws and "the capacity of the novel to irritate and rankle, even a century and a half after its first publication."

See also

Tom Shows

House Negro

Jump Jim Crow

Acting white

List of ethnic slurs

Uncle Tom syndrome

References

Notes

External links

An article on the Uncle Tom caricature

Category:Pejorative terms for people Category:Ethnic and religious slurs Category:American slang Category:Fictional slaves Category:American culture Category:Stereotypes of African Americans Category:Racism Category:African-American culture

de:Uncle Tom es:Tío Tom gl:Tío Tom nl:Uncle Tom no:Onkel Tom pt:Uncle Tom