Intention, Text and Response

Abstract

Charles Dickens’s literary intentions, as he expressed them, were simple enough. He said again and again in his letters, his speeches, and in the Prefaces he wrote for various editions of his novels that he wanted to ‘brighten up the lives and fancies of others’. He wanted to ‘increase the stock of harmless cheerfulness’ in the world; to tell his audience ‘that the world is not utterly to be despised’. He wrote to please and to entertain. Being a writer for an audience whom John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson have described as ‘delicately responsive’3 to his every move, he was delighted each time he was smitten by what he often called ‘a pretty idea’, and always eager to see ‘what effects’ its execution would generate in his readers.KeywordsLiterary TextFictive WorldIrrelevant DetailComic RepetitionOliver TwistThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.