Dickens is one of the greatest literary icons in the English-speaking world, who possessed a genius as a communicator as well as a storyteller, and who remains a writer of inexhaustible popular interest, as notable today on screen as on the bookshelf. Michael Slater has spent half a century reading and writing about him – above all enjoying him. In this book he provides a personal insight into the truth of a famous tribute paid to Dickens by a helper on his triumphal public reading tours: ‘The more you want out of the Master, the more you’ll find in him.’
Ranging widely over Dickens’ fiction, journalism, letters and speeches, The Genius of Dickens captures the ideas and beliefs, the social and artistic ideals of ‘Dickensian values’, and the ambition, that inspired and shaped Dickens’ prodigious output, offering an authoritative short portrait of Dickens the man and writer.
