David Daiches, Dickens' World

With Charles Dickens, journalism and melodrama are gathered into the novel to give it new life and a new and important place in middle-class entertainment. If he learned something from eighteenth-century novelists, especially Smollett, he learned even more from his own circumstances and observation, combining an extraordinary relish for the odd, the colorful, and the dramatic in urban life and in human character with a keen eye for the changes which the Industrial Revolution brought into England in his lifetime, an acute consciousness of his own lower-middle-class origin and the unhappy circumstances of his own childhood (which included his father's imprisonment for debt and his own much resented employment at a blacking factory as a youngster), and a sentimentally humanitarian attitude toward human problems. Beginning as little more than a comic journalist, he soon discovered his special gifts as a novelist, gifts which enabled him to present to his delighted readers stories set in his own day or the recent past in which the vitality of the characters, the enthusiastic savoring of their physical environment, the movement from comedy to pathos and from compassion to horror, and the sheer high spirits with which he rendered eccentrics, villains, unfortunates, hypocrites, social climbers, nouveaux riches, criminals, innocents, bureaucrats, exhibitionists, selfdeceivers, roisterers, and confidence men, human oddities of all kinds each with his own physical and moral individuality and each involved in a rich pattern of interacting lives played out against social background whose sights and sounds and smells were rendered with a vivid particularity-in which all this is presented with an almost reckless profusion. Read more  

New community posts: David Copperfield research paper * A tale of two cities * Mrs Copperfield vs Dora * David's Life

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Tom Schulman's Dead Poets Society

Try never to think about anything the same way twice. If you're sure about something, force yourself to think about it another way, even if you know it's wrong or silly. When you read, don't consider only what the author thinks, but take the time to consider what you think. You must strive to find your own voice, boys, and the longer you wait to begin, the less likely you are to find it at all. Thoreau said, "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation." I ask, why be resigned to that? Risk walking new ground. Now. A flame in your hearts could change the world, lads. Nurture it. Read more

Recommendations: Ralph Freedman's Life of a Poet: R.M.Rilke, * Rilke.de, maybe the best site on Rilke, and certainly very impressive... (in German) 

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I am sick in a miserable and unbearable way. A not so well known change of the globules in my blood becomes the beginning of many awful effects inside my body, that break it up. And me, who was never able to see him right, to his face, I now learn to conform with the countless, anonymous pain. I learn with difficulty, under hundreds of resistances and so melancholy a wonder. It is my wish for you to know about this condition of mine which is not going to be temporary.

R. M. Rilke, Dec. 15, 1926, Val-Mont