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Lucinda Hawksley

Autor de Essential Pre-Raphaelites

29+ Obras 1,370 Miembros 35 Reseñas 1 Preferidas

Sobre El Autor

Lucinda Hawksley is an author, broadcaster and public speaker. She has written more than twenty books, including critically acclaimed biographies, art history, social history, the history of London and travel writing. This is her third book about her great great great grandfather, Charles Dickens. mostrar más Lucinda has appeared on television and radio programmes around the globe. She is a Patron of the Charles Dickens Museum in London. mostrar menos
Créditos de la imagen: lucindahawksley.com

Obras de Lucinda Hawksley

Essential Pre-Raphaelites (1999) 388 copias
The Real Sherlock (2019) 82 copias
Dickens and Christmas (2017) 25 copias
When Art Really Works (2012) — Autor — 22 copias
What Makes Great Art: 80 Masterpieces Explained (2012) — Autor — 21 copias

Obras relacionadas

Essential Michelangelo (2001) — Introducción — 272 copias

Etiquetado

Conocimiento común

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This was very entertaining and super informative. I had to dock a star for one reason - it was very repetitive in certain areas. When introducing an actor who was a speaker, I did not need to have his roles read out to me every time he spoke. Completely unnecessary and annoying.
 
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DanHelfer | 4 reseñas más. | Dec 29, 2022 |
Travel writer and great-great-great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens, Lucinda Hawksley has written about her illustrious ancestor, including Dickens and Christmas. Her newest book explores Dickens as a travel writer. “Almost everywhere I have travelled,” she shares, “I have discovered a connection with my great-great-great grandfather.”

It’s been perhaps forty years since I read a biography on Dicken, and I had no recollection of his extensive travels across Europe. I was aware of his visits to America. I will admit, I have not read ALL of Dickens’ books, although a complete set has been on my shelf for almost fifty years. I was surprised to learn how many of his books reflect his experience abroad.

When depression hit him, his wanderlust inspired him to go abroad, not only on tours but to take up residence for a lengthy time in Italy and Paris. Hawksley draws from Dickens’ letters, articles, and books to provide quotes about his experiences. I loved reading them, enjoying Dickens’ humor and vivid descriptions.

Dickens traveling began in England when he was a journalist seeking to cover stories, “adrenaline-fueled travels,” Hawskely calls them. “Belated on miry by-roads, towards the small hours, forty or fifty miles from Long, in a wheelless carriage, with exhausted horses and drunken postboys,” Dickens wrote, arriving in time to turn in his story to the printers. The roads were muddy and rough, the countryside held robbers. His experiences informs The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.

What a prodigious walker Dickens was! Day-long walks in all kinds of weather. Consider Dickens’ description of one day in Scotland: “To-day we have had a journey of between 50 and 60 miles, though the bleakest and most desolate part of Scotland, where the hill-tops are still covered with great patches of snow, and the road winds over steep mountain-passes, and on the brink of deep brooks and precipices.” Another day it took four hours to walk sixteen miles in a gale, his wife Catherine’s timely removal from the carriage coming before it was caught up in a flood.

Everywhere he went, Dickens toured the prisons and noted the conditions of the poorest neighborhoods. He was particularly appalled by slavery. Southerners persisted in asking him his feelings about their ‘domestic institution,’ and he told them what he thought. He didn’t finish his American tour, turning back North.

“Party feeling runs high,” he wrote about 1842 America, “the great constitutional feature of this institution being, that directly the acrimony of the last election is over, the acrimony of the next one begins…” (Some things never change!)

One American custom that disgusted him was spitting. He describes floors slick with it, “the stone floor looks as if it were paved with open oysters.”

Dickens met many American writers, including a young Edgar Allan Poe, who was inspired by Dicken’s pet raven Grip when he wrote his famous poem The Raven. Grip ended up in the Philadelphia Free Library! In Washington D. C. he dined with John Quincy Adams, noting that “Adams is a fine old fellow-seventy-six years old, but with most surprising vigor, memory, readiness, and pluck.” He felt sympathy for the Native Americans, reduced to assimilation for survival, and he was appalled by the destruction of the country’s primal forests.

Dickens wrote, “Canada has held, and always will retain, a foremost place in my remembrance.”

Lengthy quotations from Dickens on Italy describes its beauty and the discomfort: “…but in the day you must keep the lattice-blinds close shut, or the sun would drive you mad; and when the sun goes down you must shut up all the windows or the mosquitoes would tempt you to commit suicide.” He also noted “the fleas, whose size is prodigious, and whose name is Legion, and who populate the coach-house to the extent that I daily expect to see the carriage going off bodily, drawn by myriads of industrious fleas in harness.”

He especially loved Paris, France, “the most extraordinary place in the world.” He met Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas, and George Sand. He reveled in his fame, while Catherine became more unhappy. They had been happy for many years, but after many children, and becoming stout, she was losing him. Dickens fell in love with actress Ellen Ternan, who was his daughter’s age. Catherine moved out, and Dickens set Ellen up in an apartment with her mother.

He made a second trip to America to raise money, but his health was poor during this time, with a cough and a swollen foot, unable to sleep or eat, dependent on laudanum. His hoped for trip to Australia and New Zealand never happened; Dickens died at age 58.

I so enjoyed this book and I have to wonder why I never read his travel books. It is something to look forward to.

I received a free egalley from Pen & Sword History through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.
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nancyadair | Jun 28, 2022 |
 
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mahallett | 7 reseñas más. | Mar 3, 2022 |
This book recounts the connections with Christmas in Dickens's life. While he is most famous of course for A Christmas Carol published in 1843, this was just the first in a series of five Christmas books published over most of the next few Christmases; and for almost the whole of the rest of his life, much of Dickens's life each year was devoted to the Christmas editions of the magazines he edited, Household Words and All the Year Round. This publication treadmill caused Dickens more and more difficulty and stress as the decades rolled by, contradicting his public image as the embodiment of the evolving Victorian Christmas. The Victorian era was the time when many of the modern Christmas traditions first evolved, or at least became more widespread: Christmas trees (though the first known one is attributed to Queen Charlotte's, George III's wife); Christmas cards (originally pictures of the sender's family, not seasonal images); Christmas cakes (as opposed to Twelfth Night cakes, 25 December having taken over from Twelfth Night as the focal day of the Christmas season during the middle part of the 19th century, and the season having effectively reduced from 12 days to three); Christmas shopping. Complaints about the commercialisation of Christmas are nothing new; even before the Victorian era, "each ageing generation complained that Christmas was not as it had been in their childhood. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was a feeling that too many Christmas traditions had fallen out of fashion and that a Christmas renaissance was needed", it being felt "In this still new century, .......by many critics that there was too much emphasis on money and possessions at Christmas time". Some things never change.… (más)
 
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john257hopper | 5 reseñas más. | Dec 27, 2021 |

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Obras
29
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1
Miembros
1,370
Popularidad
#18,773
Valoración
3.8
Reseñas
35
ISBNs
78
Idiomas
4
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