Although I find this book slightly more interesting than did the reviewer who likened it to Sominex, I have to confess that I am trying to finish it out of obstinacy and of my interest in Dicken's life. Ackroyd's writing style does indeed get on my nerves, particularly his effusions about Dickens' genius. Maybe he was a genius, but we don't have to be reminded 40 times a chapter! What bothered me the most were the chapters inserted here and there that were Ackroyd's fictional accounts of Dickens meeting his characters or other writers who did not live in his time. I found them corny and unbearable. I have never seen anything like this in other biographies, and I think that's a good thing. The only reason I am giving this book 2 stars is that it reflects an incredible amount of scholarship. But I have no idea why it is so well-regarded.

It's absolutely shocking Peter Ackroyd's magisterial and magical biography of Charles Dickens has fallen out of print: I think I had more pure readerly pleasure reading this work than just about any biography or novel I've read in the last fifteen years. This is really a one-of-a-kind work: Ackroyd writes his life of Dickens as if it were a Dickens novel, and the descriptions of Dickens's London and Rochester spill out in page after page of densely glorious prose. It's a long book, and it is not lightly undertaken, and Ackroyd does some very out-of-fashion gestures here (like profess his belief in Dickens' genius, as other reviewers have noted) very readily. But I can't think of a biography I would recommend more highly.

It's a rare biography that leaves you with the feeling that there's nothing more that could be said about its subject. This is one of them. It helps that Ackroyd has so much space to work with. (In this respect, it's like Jackson J. Benson's "The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer" - also shamefully out of print.) But utimately it's a function of Ackroyd's profound understanding of the various aspects of Dickens' character and genius. The occasional veering into fantasia is a bold experiment that, in my opinion, fails decisively but these brief chapters are infrequent and simple to skip. They are a trivial blemish on the face of this monument of scholarship and imagination.

Although this was not one of my tutor's recommended "books to buy" I have bought it anyhow. Although Dickens' descriptions of The English Reformation are, at times, simplistic, this book is invaluable for gaining an overview of what was going on during the period. I recommend it to any college student, as a springboard to more weightier tomes.

Location in Space - This is a very educational and interesting book about economic and urban geography. This book is a MUST for all Culture Geography students in University. It is very detailed in it's explanition that does it easy to read and understand the subject, which mainly economic geography.

This book was very informative, but there was not enough information about the less well known authors and almost too much about Dickens and Bronte.

Pool's book is a well-paced survey of the industry that produced the greater (well-known) Victorian novels. By "industry" is meant process. He covers the development of publishing houses, writers, lending libraries, serials, trans-atlantic markets, and the innovative way that enterprising book distributors managed to bring their product to the public. It all combines for a fascinating story, and Pool does it well.
It could be said that he focuses on three writers, these being Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, and William Makepeace Thackeray. These three (along with Marian Evans a.k.a. George Eliot) played a vital role in the development of the Victorian novel, and they comprise the bulk of Pool's discussion.
The interaction and intrigues between the main three authors make for National Enquirer-like fodder... with the difference that this stuff is TRUE! Truly, there were "rows and romances" as the subtitle suggests.
The Victorian era was an exciting, but very demanding (downright scary) time to be an author. There were the restraints of format (the serial novel had to be written in self-contained installments; the "triple-decker" had to be able to be neatly split in three), there was the gender prejudice (one ought not to be a woman writer), and there was the ubiquitous spirit of cut-throat competition and jealousy in this burgeoning literary world. Only the strong survived, and only the versatile were recognized at all.
The latter third of the book covers the rise of great writers like Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James.
The author takes a subject having the potential of being dry as crackers and presents it as a sprawling and wonderfully connected story. Good work. Reading this book made me realize that there is a HISTORY to the easy access to good literature we enjoy in our day and age, and made me appreciate those many pioneers who cut the swath to it.

Let's get this straight right off the bat: Daniel Pool's book is purposefully mistitled to make you think that it would be a sequel of sorts to his extremely useful and popular compendium of facts important to Victorian fiction WHAT CHARLES DICKENS ATE AND JANE AUSTEN KNEW. This book is very different: it reads like a straightforward narrative, and it's an enjoyable, gossipy, and onformative account of the demands of the publishing market in the mid-Victorian world of the novel, and how it created the careers of Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, Thackeray, George Eliot, etc. The mistitling (undoubtedly to make the book sell better) is thus quite appropriate, in that the novel helpfully etails the ways in which publishing conventions of the time (the rise of Mudie's lending library, the convention of the three-decker) made and shaped literary careers.

This is perhaps Dickens' least successful novel from a modern standpoint. It simply doesn't hold together, as the author changes his mind about the book's direction a few times during its serial publication; changes the nature of certain characters along the way; and reveals the narrator's identity at the end (always a mistake) when in fact it is most unlikely that this particular character could have known half of what went on in the book. Modern readers will find it quite sentimental, but then it made Dickens hugely popular in his day, and is not without memorable characters as always, among them the quasi-demonic Daniel Quilp. Quilp seems to do evil for no particular reason other than that he himself is evil, therefore the book offers little pointed social critique. Dickens is nothing if not entertaining, however, and he is always worth a look.

The Old Curiosity Shop certainly displays the hallmarks of the unstructured, free-flowing make-it-up-as-you-go-along type of story characteristic of Dickens's early novels. Indeed, it is rather generous to call it a story, and it's difficult now to understand the sensation it caused when it was first published. However, if a page-turning plot was all there was to it, very few of Dickens's novels would be readable at all. As ever with Dickens, the pleasure in reading this book comes from the comedy, diversity and richness of the characters, as well as the sheer mastery of the English language which came so naturally to him.

The central characters are old Trent, his granddaughter Nell, the moneylender Daniel Quilp, young Kit and the wonderful Richard Swiveller. Of these, the spotlessly pure Nell and the irredeemably evil Quilp are the moral opposites around which the book revolves, old Trent is rather a pathetic figure, while Kit's sturdy progress from poverty to respectability makes for happier reading. However, it is the moral journey of Swiveller, which perhaps reflects the geographic journey undertaken by Nell and her grandfather, which is the real joy of this book. He enters the book in the guise of a rogue, involved in dubious intrigues with Nell's no-good brother and also with the repulsive Quilp. However, from the time that Quilp gets him a job as a clerk in the office of Samson Brass and his sister, the awful Miss Brass, Swiveller's basic decency and natural good humour begin to reveal themselves, and his soliloquies and dialogue provide many hilarious moments from that point on. The Dick Swiveller who subsequently meets up with the hapless young girl kept prisoner by Miss Brass is funny, considerate, charming and kind, and a long way from the doubtful type of character that he at first appears to be.

The book proceeds along two different narrative lines; one which charts the progress of Nell and her grandfather on their long journey, and the other revolving around Swiveller, Quilp and Kit, and to a lesser extent the families of these latter two, as well as "the single gentleman" and the little girl memorably christened "The Marchioness" by Swiveller. One of the big faults I found with this dual structure is that the characters of one plot line have no contact with those in the other plot line for most of the novel, and it is left to the Quilp, Swiveller and Kit to act out most of the drama. Nell and her grandfather spend most of their time journeying through various scenes of early nineteenth century life in England. Nonetheless these all make for enjoyable reading. One particular scene where Nell and her grandfather sleep beside a furnace in the company of a wretched man who watches the flames is particularly memorable.

All in all, it's not exactly a page-turner, and the ending is not a happy one. I would not recommend this book as an introduction to Dickens, and is best read by people, like myself, who have already decided that anything by Dickens is worth reading. Also it focuses less on London than many Dickens novels, and gives an interesting view of rural, village and town life outside London in those times.

This edition of the Old Curiosity Shop is outstanding. It contains all the original illustrations drawn for the book, very helpful footnotes, a chronology of Dickens's life, etc. The book takes the reader on a wild journey through the English countryside with Little Nell, an angelic girl, and her troublesome grandfather, and features a host of amusing characters as only Dickens can draw them. While it was being written in serial form, it was so popular that sailors returning to port in England were known to shout to people on shore to ask what was going on with Little Nell. Today, however, you can miss some of Dickens's nuance and humor if you don't have good footnotes to turn to. The notes in this book explain obscure terms, references to contemporary popular culture, places where the action occurs, etc. If you are going to read this book, this is the edition to buy.

I hated reading Dickens in high school, and I was never able to get past the first chapter of any of his books, including this one. Now that I'm in my mid-30's, I want to re-visit a lot of the works that I had no patience for as a teenager, so I read Hard Times. Although there are many flaws to this book, I felt proud to have finally cleared the Dickens hurdle. Dickens is excellent at creating sympathetic (and evil) characters, even though they may be slightly cliche or wooden. The fact is, Dickens is able to hook you in with his plots and create a profound concern on behalf of the reader that the good guy (or girl) wins and the bad guy suffers. A lot of the twists in this book were a little "too convenient" and implausible to make it a crowining work of literature, but nevertheless it has motivated me to move on to Dickens' larger, more daunting works. If you are having any trepidation about tackling Dickens, Hard Times is a good place to start.

Here is a stunning indictment of soot-covered early Victorian England. Its relevance today though should not be underestimated. Parallels abound both here at home and the world over. Hard Times is brilliant and multifaceted. Dickens is both dreadfully serious and stingingly witty. And yes, a thorough Marxist reading is certainly possible. Dickens cared deeply about the world in which he lived and his humanity shines through in every line. This book, and all that Dickens wrote, is worthwhile if only for the beauty of the prose. Those forced to read it in school are unlikely to see its value as anyone forced to do anything against the will is going to be resentful and rejecting. Be deeply suspicious though of the reader from Madison Wisconsin, Hitler, or anyone who advises the literal trashing of books.

Dickens creates a novel that virtually revolutionizes literature of the 1800's. At a time where most writers wrote in a stuffy prose full of unrealities and a jaded outlook, Dickens dares to tell with honesty what he sees through his window.

Hard Times has yet a misleading title. It gives one ideas of harshness, depression, poverty, and social decline--although the actual reality of then-London, still not something you would choose to read. However, Hard Times has as much depression and poverty as any of Dickens' other works. It is just in this case that Dickens chooses to remind the world that in the deepest despair there is beauty yet to be seen.

Dickens was a strange author. In his supposedly inspiring books, you get an overdose of sadness, and in his depressing books, you find beauty. It is this case with Hard Times.

It is a poor, honest man's search for justice in a world where only the rich have merit. It is a girl's search for true love while battling the arranged marriage for money. And lastly, a woman's search for recognition against her favored, yet dishonest brother. It is these searches that at last come together and become fufilled. And, while at the same time telling a captivating story, it comments on the then--and still now--presence of greed and total dishonesty one has to go through for money.

The title of this review sums up Hard Times. Its beauty comes from the pure searches for truth, the sorrow comes from the evil the characters most overcome to get there, and the honesty is both the truth with which Dickens portrays life and the the overwhelming truth that these protaganists create.

Holly Burke, PhD.

Clinical Psychologist, Abnormal Psych. Professor

Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins Inst.