|
In this groundbreaking study, which focuses on Dickens's early novels Nicholas Nickleby and Barnaby Rudge, City Journal editor Myron Magnet argues that the liberal reformism for which Dickens is so well known rested on a surprisingly traditional view of society. "Magnet has two principal aims. One is to persuade us that Dickens was far more a novelist of ideas than his reputation suggests; the other is to demonstrate that his liberal (or radical) attitudes were embedded in an essentially conservative view of the world. On both counts, he seems successful; his book is well argued, attractively written, and all in all one of the most stimulating studies of Dickens to have appeared in recent years" (New York Times). This edition includes a substantial new preface by the author.
What They're Saying...
"Perhaps you know Dickens the sentimentalist? Meet Dickens the realist. You've heard of Dickens the utopian reformer? Allow me to introduce Dickens the hard-headed pragmatist. In Dickens and the Social Order, Myron Magnet has rescued Dickens from his rosier-cheeked admirers and given us another, more robust Dickens—Dickens the advocate of law and order, the partisan of legitimate authority, the defender of customs and mannerly behavior. Three cheers to Myron Magnet for this literary and moral tour de force. And three cheers to ISI for bringing this forgotten masterpiece back to the public's attention."
— Roger Kimball, Managing Editor, The New Criterion
"A book that should significantly alter our general understanding of Dickens. . . . From the late 1830s onward, Dickens wrote . . . out of a profound insight into humanity’s immense capacity for destruction. We are in debt to Myron Magnet for his demonstration of the centrality of this insight and how it was ramified into a systematic view of society which helped generate the imaginative power of Dickens’s mature fiction."
— Commentary
"An important corrective to some fairly shallow notions that have been popular in the past."
— David Parker, Curator, The Dickens House
"[S]eldom have [critics] given readers a glimpse of the Dickens with whom Myron Magnet deals in his study of Britain's pre-eminent fictionist. . . ."
— The American Conservative
|