Catherine Peters
Amuthement Arcade
The Dickens Dictionary: An A–Z of England’s Greatest Novelist
By John Sutherland
Icon Books 197pp £9.99 order from our bookshop
Charles Dickens and ‘Boz’: The Birth of the Industrial-Age Author
By Robert L Patten
Cambridge University Press 426pp £45 order from our bookshop
Charles Dickens’s Networks: Public Transport and the Novel
By Jonathan H Grossman
Oxford University Press 272pp £25 order from our bookshop
Three professors, two university presses, three more books to add to the tottering pile. It is time to be scholarly about Dickens. Yet ‘people mutht be amuthed’, as Mr Sleary reiterates in Hard Times. Dickens vehemently believed that readers learn nothing from instruction if they are not first engaged through feeling and humour. So I was relieved to find that John Sutherland’s first entry in The Dickens Dictionary is on ‘Amuthement’ and that his short book is lighthearted, entertaining and, to my mind, the most stimulating of the three under review.
Sutherland is the least pompous of literary critics, as the many readers who have enjoyed his collections of nineteenth-century literary puzzles, beginning with Is Heathcliff a Murderer?, know well. He is on form with The Dickens Dictionary. Far from being yet another reference book on Dickens and all his works,
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
*Offer ends in TWO days*
Take advantage of our February offer: a six-month subscription for only £19.99.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/literaryfebruary/
'Nourished on a diet of exceptionalism and meritocracy, millennials internalised the harmful falsehood that hard work necessarily yields success. The very least they should settle for is a "cool job", one that ... is the focus of their "passion".'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/workers-twerkers
'There is a difference between a doctor who writes medical treatises and a doctor who writes absurdist fiction. Do we want our heart surgeon to be an anti-realist?'
Joanna Kavenna peruses Iain Bamforth's 'Scattered Limbs: A Medical Dreambook'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/trust-me-philosopher