title: Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist
author:  Robert Douglas-Fairhurst 
description: Douglas-Fairhurst offers an original perspective on Dickens's early life and writing as Dickens works through the choices before him in pursuit of a voice and style he could confidently claim as his own. a fresh and insightful study, moving and exceptionally well-written a book to be valued by a range of readers, and one certain to stand the test of time. (David Paroissien, University of Massachusetts, Amherst)<br /><br />Rightly rejecting familiar accounts of Dickens's life, Douglas-Fairhurst's biography shows us the forlorn and driven young Dickens, restless and uncertain, who could not yet choose what was to become his inevitable mode of composing fiction. I recommend it highly. (Harold Bloom)<br /><br /><i>Becoming Dickens</i> never takes Dickens for granted, but helps us to be surprised--shocked even--that he existed, worked and wrote in the way that he did. This counterfactual emphasis gives the book breathing space and a sense of play that is too often missing from more orthodoxly organized biographies. (John Bowen, University of York)<br /><br />This book captures the chameleon Dickens as a product of his era before he became its creator. (<i>Publishers Weekly</i> 2011-06-06)<br /><br />Douglas-Fairhurst's acute and incisive analysis of the contemporary reception of Dickens's journalism and then his first serialized fiction reveals how Dickens's keen observations and storytelling talent allowed him to rise above his station, as he forged his experiences into fiction...A perceptive and speculative biography. (Lonnie Weatherby <i>Library Journal</i> 2011-08-01)<br /><br />A convincing portrait of budding genius. (Bryce Christensen <i>Booklist</i> 2011-10-01)<br /><br />Robert Douglas-Fairhurst sets out to counter what he sees as the literary man-of-destiny version of Dickens, to recover the uncertainty, muddle and loose ends...Douglas-Fairhurst covers much ground, but one of his central ideas is Dickens's pervasive sense of what might have been. He sees it in the false trails and shadow plots (take <i>Great Expectations</i>, where Pip imagines himself in one story though is really in another), in his doublings among characters and in his jostling possibilities and competing outcomes (for instance in <i>A Christmas Carol</i>). <i>Becoming Dickens</i> is an ingenious, playful and often brilliant analysis as much as it is a narrative. (<i>The Economist</i> 2011-10-01)<br /><br />The great tide of Dickensiana, to celebrate the bicentenary of the author's birth in February 2012, has already begun to appear in the shops. While much of the attention will be focused on Claire Tomalin's <i>Charles Dickens: A Life</i>, my own favorite is Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's <i>Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist</i>. (D. J. Taylor <i>The Independent</i> 2011-09-25)<br /><br />[A] subtle and searching book...Dickens is immortal and inexhaustible, and there will be more books in the lead-up to the 200th anniversary of his birth next year. If any of them outshine [this one] we shall be luckier than mere mortals deserve. (John Carey <i>Sunday Times</i> 2011-10-02)<br /><br />Douglas-Fairhurst's <i>Becoming Dickens</i> ponders the question of how this phenomenal man happened. He identifies a series of self-defining moments in the process...Douglas-Fairhurst has all of Dickens, it seems, at his fingertips and his ear is cocked for every significant echo...What is extraordinarily fresh in <i>Becoming Dickens</i> is Douglas-Fairhurst's ability to support [his] arguments by sensitive <i>explication de texte</i>...Robert Douglas-Fairhurst reads Dickens the author with brilliant acuity. If [this book is a] harbinger of what is to come in the bicentennial year, 2012 will be a memorial fully worthy of the great Boz. (John Sutherland <i>Literary Review</i> 2011-10-01)
zlib_text: Anno 1778 • 
  PHILLIPS ACADEMY 
  viSgg** 
  OLIVER WENDELL-HOLMES # 
  LI B R ARY 
  In Honor of 
  RUSSELL H. LUC 
  Class of 1912 
  
  contains the essence of their teaching and lecturing 
  on Dickens's novels. The authors aim, not at pre¬ 
  senting a comprehensive survey of the Dickensian 
  oeuvre and creative career, but at challenging 
  sharply and decisively the established view of 
  Dickens as an exuberant genius who, in the nature 
  of the genius and the exuberance (those of an 
  entertainer and popular writer), lacked not only 
  art but any serious concern for it. In chapters con¬ 
  tributed separately, the authors establish the judg¬ 
  ment that Dickens, in his mature novels, was 
  essentially a serious and original artist and critic 
  of life, and hence was qualified to influence in 
  decisive ways — as he did — subsequent great 
  novelists.__ 
  Dr. F. R. Leavis, besides his seminal work on Hard 
  Times, writes on Dombey and Son and Little Dor- 
  rit. Dr. Q. D. Leavis presents a case for taking a 
  serious 