3 best Charles Dickens books

A Christmas Carol is a recurring, cyclical work, recovered for the cause every Christmas. Not that it is a masterpiece, or not at least his masterpiece in my opinion, but its character as a Christmas narrative with a moral triumphed and still serves today as an emblem of that transforming intention of this endearing time of year.

But good readers of Charles Dickens they know that there is much more to this author's universe. And is that Dickens did not have an easy life, and that struggle for survival in a society of thriving industrialization and parallel alienation carried over into many of his novels. With an industrial revolution already in place to stay (Dickens lived between 1812 and 1870), it only remained for the corresponding humanization to be included in the process.

So Christmas story maybe it was a literary outlet, an almost childish story but full of meaning, revealing about the profit values ​​of the nascent industrial market.

That said, by way of a light introduction to this author, let us proceed with my schoice of recommended novels.

3 Recommended Novels by Charles Dickens

History of two cities

Here we do come across what is probably his masterpiece. A novel that is a chronicle between revolutions, the French and the industrial. Revolutions that are very different in their essence and ideology but, as so often, they found their victims in the town ...

Paris as the capital of the French Revolution in which the people sought their liberation. London as the peaceful city that, in its chicha calm, prepared itself for the assault of the machines like all power.

Summary: This novel is a classic of XNUMXth century English literature. It treats in parallel the realities of England and a revolutionary France. Taking the French Revolution as a point of reference, Dickens shows the social and political problems of England, fearing that history would repeat itself in his native country when he wrote this novel.

In the contrast of these two cities presented, England is presented as confidence, tranquility, the future assured, while France becomes more and more dangerous as the novel progresses.

The acts of violence carried out by the French people are among the most memorable scenes in the book. Dickens rejects revolutionary violence in its two forms, both in its popular form, by the masses, and in its institutionalized form such as terror.

Dickens wrote a book about two cities, one that he understood and knew and the other that he neither understood nor knew. Your description of the one I didn't know about is almost better than the one I did know about.

Critics argue that Dickens based his novel on Carlyle's work on the French Revolution, but it could be said that A Tale of Two Cities is the novel of Carlyle's historical book, that is, it is the story but with added sentiment, it is the story. that catches you and immerses you in the revolutionary events of France in the XNUMXth century.

History of two cities

David Copperfield

As a fictionalized biography, this book already arouses curiosity. A Dickens disguised by fiction tells us his life. But in addition, the novel has great literary value, for its empathetic narration about the experiences of the boy who aspires to be a man.

Summary: Since its serialization between 1849 and 1850, David Cooperfield, the "favorite son" of its author, has left nothing but a trail of admiration, joy and gratitude. For Swinburne it was "a supreme masterpiece." Henry James remembered hiding under a table as a child to hear his mother read the deliveries aloud. Dostoevsky read it in his prison in Siberia.

Tolstoy considered it Dickens's greatest find, and the chapter on the tempest, the standard by which all fiction should be judged. It was Sigmund Freud's favorite novel.

Kafka imitated her in Amerika and Joyce parodied her in Ulysses. For Cesare Pavese, "in these unforgettable pages each one of us (I can't think of a higher compliment) finds again his own secret experience".

The reader now has the opportunity to recover that secret experience thanks to the new and excellent translation by Marta Solís, the first in Spanish in more than fifty years of a key work, without any doubt, of world literature.

David Copperfield

Hard times

Very close to the level of the previous novel, in this proposal we return to the idea of ​​the fit of the personal in the burgeoning dehumanized societies, whose greatest example in the XNUMXth century was England.

Summary: In life the only thing that matters is the facts. With these words from the sinister Mr. Gradgrind begins the novel Difficult Times, a novel in which from the beginning to the end the theme is the desperate search for happiness on the part of its characters.

Located in an industrial city in the north of England, the reader witnesses the slow and progressive destruction of the doctrine of the facts, which pretends to be implacable but which, seeping into the lives of the characters, remodels them, sinking some already others infusing them with new life.

Hard Times is Dickens's most critical and passionate novel and at the same time, like all of this author's works, it is an ambitious, deep and intelligent exploration of English society two centuries ago.

Hard times
5/5 - (7 votes)

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