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Book: The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits
Quotes of Book: The Man Who Invented
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  1. Les Standiford _ The Man Who Invented

    It is worth noting here, that in attracting 100,000 readers to issues of The Old Curiosity Shop, Dickens was reaching an unprecedented portion of his country's audience. While no formal records of literacy rates were kept at the time, Francis Jeffrey {Lord Jeffrey}, the eminent jurist and founder of the Edinburgh Review, wrote in an 1844 issue of that magazine that there might be 300,000 readers among the middle class in England {out of a total population of about 2 million}, with perhaps another 30,000 in the upper classes. And even if the total readership was 500,000, as some commentators have suggested, Dickens was still selling his work to somewhere between one-fifth and one-quarter of the literate public of a nation. Compare those figures with modern-day America, where 200 million or so working, literate adults constitute the potential "book-buying public," and where a sale of 75,000 to 100,000 copies-one-twentieth of one percent-is often enough to put an author high up on the list of New York Times bestsellers.
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  2. Les Standiford _ The Man Who Invented

    Society." John Forster, who would one day become Dickens's great friend, adviser, editor, and first biographer, wrote in the Examiner that Dickens had excelled particularly in his portraits of the ludicrous and the pathetic, all rendered in an "agreeable, racy style.
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  3. Les Standiford _ The Man Who Invented

    Dickens believed that a reasonable capitalistic society could be made to recognize its responsibility to all its citizens, and that it was the duty of those most fortunate to share a portion of their gain with those whose grasp had slipped while pulling at their bootstraps.
    book-quote

  4. Les Standiford _ The Man Who Invented

    To Dickens, true charity was a matter of openhearted benevolence; to use the relief of poverty as a cudgel to beat a recipient into piousness was repellent and evil.
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