Dickens and His Older People
FORMAT
DESCRIPTION
In this original and illuminating study, Dr Mervyn Eastman examines the older adult characters who populate the early works of Charles Dickens. Drawing on social history, literary criticism and literary gerontology, Eastman explores how Dickens constructed later life through figures such as Samuel Pickwick, Fagin, Ebenezer Scrooge, Daniel Quilp and Grandfather Trent.
The book considers whether the young Dickens showed signs of gerontophobia, or whether his mixed and often contradictory portrayals of older people reflected the complex attitudes of late Georgian and early Victorian society.
For readers of Dickens, Victorian literature, social history and ageing studies, Dickens and His Older People offers a distinctive exploration of how literature shapes, reflects and sometimes distorts cultural attitudes to later life.
Dickens and His Older People is a specialist literary study of older adult characters in the early fiction of Charles Dickens. The book brings together Dickens scholarship, Victorian social history and literary gerontology to examine how age, class, disability, poverty, gender, social care and cultural attitudes to later life are represented in Dickens’s work.
Dr Mervyn Eastman applies a gerontological and biographical lens to Dickens’s early novels, exploring the assumptions behind some of the author’s most memorable older characters. The study asks whether Dickens reflected the anxieties and prejudices of his era, challenged them, or did both at once.
This is a book for readers interested in Dickens, Victorian literature, ageing studies, social history, ageism and the cultural representation of older people.
- ISBN978-1-911761-53-2
- CategoriesLiterary Gerontology, Victorian Literature, Ageing & Society
- AuthorDr Mervyn Eastman
- SubjectCharles Dickens, Older People, Ageism, Social Care, Victorian Literature
- PublisherNoble Legacy Publishing Ltd
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