LT 338 - London Through the Eyes of Charles Dickens

This course embraces literature and social history, introducing students to the works of Charles Dickens and the world in which he wrote. In the nineteenth century, London was the largest city in the world: a place of vastly inflated wealth and shockingly extreme poverty, rife with social problems and crime. Students will examine the importance of London in Dickens’s work, the impact his own life experiences had on his fiction and the vast social changes Dickens helped to bring about through the medium of his writing. Students will analyze primary texts that include Oliver Twist, Bleak House, A Christmas Carol, The Old Curiosity Shop, Little Dorrit, and A Tale of Two Cities. The course will also look at Dickens’s journalistic career and examine texts within their historical context. Students will explore how the author depicted London and Londoners, as well as how the city shaped Dickens’s own life and career. In addition, students will discuss similarities between the social problems of nineteenth-century London, and those of the world today. In addition to seminar lectures and discussions, students will also attend field study trips, including but not limited to the Charles Dickens Museum in Bloomsbury (the author’s only London home to have survived war, terrorism, and developers), the National Portrait Gallery and walking tours around Dickens’s London.