Charles dickens

After you decapitate someone, might their severed head continue thinking? Prince Myshkin holds his audience spellbound with this macabre inquiry in The Idiot, a great novel whose author, Fyodor Dostoevsky, was once called the Shakespeare of the lunatic asylum. Each of his great novels concerns a murder (one a parricide); most also touch upon the sickening theme of the rape of a child. The writer Lafcadio Hearn warned that reading him might actually drive you mad: it can certainly invoke pity and terror, embarrassment and laughter. Dostoevsky’s life was even weirder than his fiction. He was born in 1821, the son of a surgeon whom he believed to have been

Beginning with what he finds to be a rather implausible account of a meeting between Dickens and Dostoevsky, Eric Naiman’s recent essay for the Times Literary Supplement spins out an astonishing story of suspect scholarship. I very much recommend reading it if you haven’t already. At the centre of the mystery is an independent historian named A.D. Harvey, and a bewildering variety of other names from letters pages and scholarly journals – Stephanie Harvey, John Schellenberger, Trevor McGovern, Leo Bellingham – that may or may not belong to him. The piece raises all sorts of questions. If you work for a magazine, however, it raises one question with particular urgency:

This post by M.E. Synon is the first in a series about Stephen Spielberg’s Lincoln. A counter-argument will be published tomorrow, followed by a comparison of screen and literary adaptations of the last months of Abraham Lincoln’s life. Last week in Dublin there was the European premiere of Spielberg’s film on Lincoln. Why Dublin? Because the star Daniel Day-Lewis lives in Ireland and he wanted the premiere as a fundraiser for an Irish charity. All of which meant I’ve been writing on Lincoln for the Irish press, trying – and I know it’s fruitless, but still I go on – trying again to explain to the Irish that Lincoln was a racist,

You cannot have failed to learn that a new film adaptation of Great Expectations has been released today. Publicity for the film is ubiquitous: posters of Ralph Fiennes as Magwitch and Helena Bonham Carter as Miss Havisham adorn the billboards of train stations and the hoardings that overlook thoroughfares. The stars have been interviewed on television and the radio. Even the press has found time to divert its manic attention from Sir Brian Leveson’s clever, clever musings to review the film. The coverage asks the question, do we need another adaptation of Dickens’ well-studied classic? There are plenty of views but few of them bother to consider the novelty of

Is there room for yet another book on Dickens? Probably not, but we’ll have it anyway. The Dickens Dictionary (Icon, £9.99) is John Sutherland’s contribution to the great birthday festival — and possibly not his last, for since his retirement from academe, Sutherland has been nearly as industrious as the great man himself. This brief and lively ‘A-Z of England’s Greatest Novelist’ avoids all the obvious thoroughfares, and wanders instead along the byways and backstreets of Dickens’ s vast, sprawling achievement. This will be of no use to anyone who enjoyed the recent TV version of Great Expectations because it cut out all the subplots and extraneous detail, but for

The actor-biographer Simon Callow has played Dickens, and has created Dickensian characters, in monologues and in a solo bravura rendition of A Christmas Carol. Now he suggests that the theatricality of Dickens’s own life is a subject worthy of exploration in book form. So it is, and if Callow had done so, it might have made a useful addition to what he rightly identifies as the ‘tsuanami’ of books that are appearing for Dickens’ bicentennial. But in this cursory biography, he merely makes token gestures in that direction: we learn rather a lot about Charles Mathews’ one-man shows; and Callow describes the theatrical impulses behind some of the novels. But

It is the bicentenary of Charles Dickens’ birth in February, and Christmas Day today; so a sterling occasion to reproduce The Spectator’s original review of A Christmas Carol from the archives. It was written for our issue dated 23 December 1843, and differs from most modern reviews in quoting extremely liberally from the text, to the extent that there is more Dickens than Spectator in what follows. But, on this morning of all mornings, I thought few would complain about that: ‘The object of this seasonable and well-intentioned little book is to promote the social festivities and charities of Christmas, by showing the beneficial influence of these celebrations of the