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Jump to navigationJump to searchCharles Dickens: Scenes from an Extraordinary Life by Mick Manning and Brita Granstrom (view source)
Revision as of 14:35, 7 August 2014
, 14:35, 7 August 2014no edit summary
|summary=A cheeky little biography of Dickens, using his words, and a mix of large spreads and small cartoons, to convey the major points of his life and works.
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''Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life these pages must show…'' Such Dickens wrote – although of course he never wrote that about himself. He did write a lot – letters, short stories, travel journals, and of course a firm dozen classic novels – but never a strict autobiography. This book for the primary school age reader gets round that by cribbing bits from here and there, and by using a good graphic eye, to tell the stories of not only his life, but many of the works too.
It's a clever idea, done almost as well as it could be. I'll ignore the silly voice bubbles in the main images, for they add nothing beyond his nickname for his wife (''mouse''). Through the spread of double-page illustrations we touch on all the relevant factors of his life – the theatre, his schooling, his working in a London factory, and so on through visiting America, to his social reform, ''that'' Christmas story, and ''that'' train crash. But time is also taken to summarise the books – which is done in a way that didn't exactly turn me on to reading them, but do give some clues as to the style and format many of them follow, despite being reduced to say six cartoon panels and a teasing caption or two.
