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.
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