Auden, and he longed to create in art a figure as memorable as the characters in Dickens or in Tolstoy.
The inhumanity of American prisons was as much a theme for Dickens, visiting America in 1842, as the cynicism of American lawyers.
The BFI season is described as the largest retrospective of Dickens on film and television ever staged.
At the same time, the Dean of Westminster, Arthur Stanley, was searching for a famous writer to boost the standing of Westminster Abbey in British life, and Dickens was seen as the ideal candidate to be laid to rest in Poets' Corner.
The district judge said after a five-day hearing at Llandudno that he believed the claim that Dickens had referred to himself as a Rachman - the notorious slum landlord in London in the 1950s and 60s.
BBC: NEWS | UK | Wales | North West Wales | Landlord's asbo after 'threats'
But freshly dressed for her winter holidays, stately windows wreathed against the chill and catawba branches flickering in torchlight, the town displays an array of cozy-clapboard imagery so complete, that the effect is as comfortable as Dickens.
American litigation has gotten nearly as bad as the British system of justice in the 19th Century when Charles Dickens wrote the lawyer-bashing novel Bleak House.
FORBES: Beleaguered Barbie's Girl Fight Busts Mattel Profits
And there were stamps for the Royal Wedding, Dickens' bicentenary, and themes such as animals or space exploration.
Dickens also satirised the law in his novels, such as Bleak House, the tale of a decades-long court case that destroys most of its participants.
Dickens, for example, is suffused with the Arabian Nights as it was translated in the 18th Century.
It can be seen as a strange case of life mirroring Dickens's final artistic efforts - the author's last, unfinished work, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, centred on the suspense of the possibility of a corpse hidden in Rochester Cathedral.
But the fundamental mystery of what fired that unique and extravagant imagination remains, as Dickens told his American friend, unfathomable.
Fisher told me that her current boyfriend has read the complete works of Shakespeare aloud to her in bed, as well as some Dickens and Ibsen.
Charles Dickens was born in 1812 into a volatile period often referred to as the Age of Reform, where industrialisation was rapidly reshaping Britain, and legislators were - more than ever - struggling to adapt to the demands of a changing population.
As its CEO in the two decades between 1981 and 2001, Neutron Jack Welch streamlined the dickens out of GE.
Going into the field to make a few shekels is about an effective a strategy as moving to Casablanca for the waters, despite the fact that, once upon a time, Charles Dickens not only wrote for money, he was pilloried by critics for doing just that.
Likewise, argues Cunningham, Dickens shared the Victorian establishment's fear of the mob - publishing Barnaby Rudge (1840) as a critique of mob action.
应用推荐