The Pictures from Italy are excellent in themselves and excellent as a foil to the American Notes. Here we have none of that air of giving a decision like a judge or sending in a report like an inspector; here we have only glimpses, light and even fantastic glimpses, of a world that is really alien to Dickens. It is so alien that he can almost entirely enjoy it. For no man can entirely enjoy that which he loves; contentment is always unpatriotic. The difference can indeed be put with approximate perfection in one phrase. In Italy he was on a holiday; in America he was on a tour. But indeed Dickens himself has quite sufficiently conveyed the difference in the two phrases that he did actually use for the titles of the two books. Dickens often told unconscious truths, especially in small matters. The American Notes really are notes, like the notes of a student or a professional witness. The Pictures from Italy are only pictures from Italy, like the miscellaneous pictures that all tourists bring from Italy.
A whole generation, on either side of the Atlantic, used to fall sobbing at the name of Little Nell, which will hardly bring tears to the eyes of any one now, though it is still apparent that the child was imagined with real feelings, and her sad little melodrama was staged with sympathetic skill. When all is said against the lapses of taste and truth, the notion of the young girl wandering up and down the country with her demented grandfather, and meeting good and evil fortune with the same devotion, till death overtakes her, is something that must always touch the heart. It is preposterously overdone, yes, and the author himself falls into pages of hysterical rhythm, which once moved people, when he ought to have been writing plain, straight prose; yet there is in all a sense of the divinity in common and humble lives, which is the most precious quality of literature, as it is almost the rarest, and it is this which moves and consoles. It is this quality in Dickens which Tolstoy prizes and accepts as proof of his great art, and which the true critic must always set above any effect of literary mastery. "The Old Curiosity Shop" makes strong appeal to a youthful imagination, and contains little that is beyond its scope. Dickenss sentiment, however it may distress the mature mind of our later day, is not unwholesome, and, at all events in this story, addresses itself naturally enough to feelings unsubdued by criticism. His quality of picturesqueness is here seen at its best, with little or nothing of that melodrama which makes the alloy of "Nicholas Nickleby" and "Oliver Twist" to speak only of the early books.
The Uncommercial Traveller is a collection of Dickenss memories rather than of his literary purposes; but it is due to him to say that memory is often more startling in him than prophecy in anybody else. They have the character which belongs to all his vivid incidental writing: that they attach themselves always to some text which is a fact rather than an idea. He was one of those sons of Eve who are fonder of the Tree of Life than of the Tree of Knowledgeeven of the knowledge of good and of evil. He was in this profoundest sense a_r_e_al_i_s_t. Critics have talked of an artist with his eye on the object. Dickens as an essayist always had his eye on an object before he had the faintest notion of a subject. All these works of his can best be considered as letters; they are notes of personal travel, scribbles in a diary about this or that that really happened. But Dickens was one of the few men who have the two talents that are the whole of literatureand have them both together.
Calquera época do ano é un bo momento para reencontrarse con esta clásica novela de Charles Dickens protagonizada polo avarento señor Scrooge e os xa célebres espíritos do Nadal Pasado, do Nadal Presente e do Nadal Futuro. Un cálido relato que nos convida..
La anciana Sophonisba se traslada a vivir a Londres. Enfrente de su nueva residencia hay un inmueble señorial pero deteriorado, del que cuelga desde tiempos inmemoriales el cartel de "Se alquila". ¿Por que, se pregunta Sophonisba, nadie quiere alquilar la casa? ¿Y por que ve en ella, si esta deshabitada, un ojo que la mira? Jabez Jarber, su eterno pretendiente, y Trottle, su fiel criado, se proponen aclarar el misterio.
Considerat per molts com un dels millors llibres de la literatura universal, el Pickwick de Dickens és una d''aquelles obres que cada generació fa seves, sovint amb punts de vista i interpretacions noves. Embolcallat amb histories extraordinaries d''amistat, d''integritat personal i de lleialtat. Som davant d''un Dickens vitalista i lluminos. I el mes divertit.Acontravent i Traduccions Inedites es complauen a presentar una nova traduccio integra, feta per Miquel Casacuberta, que combina el gust per un llenguatge elegant i ric amb la voluntat de fer arribar aquesta obra extraordinaria a un public ampli i divers.
