SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA

1) ‘The Way of the World’ is written by the English playwright William Congreve. The epigraph found on the title page of the 1700 edition of The Way of the World contains two Latin quotes from Horace’s Satires. (UGC NET, Q 8, PAPER-2, DEC 2004)

2) Widely regarded as one of the best Restoration comedies it premiered in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London. The play is based on the two lovers Mirabell and Millamant.

3) Witwoud and Petulant want them to marry and receive Millamant’s full dowry, Mirabell must receive the blessing of Millamant’s aunt Lady Wishfort.

4)    The supposed couples in the play are: Lady Wishfort+ Sir Rowland; Millamant+ Sir Wilful Witwoud; Fainall (Mirabell’s friend having an affair with Mrs Marwood) + Mrs Fainall (Lady Wishfort’s daughter); Witwell (Mirabell’s servant) + Foible (Lady Wishfort’s female servant).

5)  The Old Bachelor is the first play written by British playwright William Congreve produced in 1693. The ‘Old Bachelor’ is Heartwell who falls in love with Sylvia.

6) ‘Love for Love’ is a Restoration Comedy written by English playwright William Congreve premiered on 30 April 1695 at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre. It was perhaps more successful than’ The Way of the World’ in its day. The main character is Valentine who is in love with Angelica.

7)  Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812-1870) is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. The English novelist and the social critic created some of the world’s best-known fictional character.

8)  Dicken’s father John was incarcerated in a debtors’ prison. At the age of 12, he left school to start working in a boot-blacking factory.

9)  Dickens literary success began with the serial publication of The Pickwick Papers with the introduction of character Sam Weller. His novels, most of them published in monthly or weekly instalments pioneered serial publication of narrative fiction. Cliffhanger endings in his serial publications kept readers in suspense.

10) Opening a new and inspiring class of readers, his 1843 novella A Christmas Carol remains popular. Here’s a chronological order of his work: The Pickwick Papers (1836), Oliver Twist (1837 to 1839), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840), Dombey and Son (1846), David Copperfield (1849), Bleak House (1852), Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit (1855), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1860)

11) The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870-) was left unfinished due to Dickens death.

12) Elizabth Roylance, a family friend whom Dickens is immortalized as Mrs Pipchin in Dombey and Son. Archibald Russell provided the inspiration for the garlands in The Old Curiosity Shop. Marshalsea debtors’ prison was used as a setting in Little Dorrit.

13) David Copperfield, Dickens’ most autobiographical novel recollects his unhappy childhood. In 1830, Dickens first met Maria Beadnell, the model for his character Dora.

14) Published in 1836, Sketches by Boz- Boz is a family nickname he employed as pseudonym for some years.

15) Oliver Twist, published in 1838, became one of Dickens’s better-known stories and was the first Victorian novel with a child protagonist. Little Nell, referred to as Nell Trent is a fictional character in the 1841 novel, The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens.

16) The Office of Circumlocution occurs in Little Dorrit. It was published in serial form between 1855 and 1857. The story features Amy Dorrit raised in the Marshalsea Prison for debtors in London. The novel satirizes some shortcomings of both the government and society. Dickens is critical of the impotent bureaucracy in the form of fictional ‘Circumlocution Office’. (UGC-NET, Q23, PAPER2 DEC-2004)

17) Hard Times: For These Times is the tenth novel published in 1854. It is by far the shortest of Dickens’ novels. The story is set in the fictitious Victorian industrial Coketown, similar to Manchester or may be partially based on 19th century Preston.

18) The novel is important from the point of view of Dickens treatment of trade unions and his post-industrial revolution pessimism. F.R Leavis included it as part of his Great Tradition of English novels.

19) The novel follows a tripartite structure, each title related to Galatians 6:7, “For whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” Book 1 is entitled ‘Sowing’, Book 2 is entitled as ‘reaping’ and the Third book is ‘Garnering’. The main character is Superintendent Mr. Gradgrind. Others are: Josiah Bounderby, Louisa, Sissy Jupe, Tom, Stephen Blackpool, and such others.

20) Bleak House is a novel by Charles Dickens published between 1852 and 1853. The novel is partly told by heroine Esther Summerson and partly by omniscient narrator. At its center lies a long-running legal case in the Court of Chancery, Jarndyce and Jarndyce. It supported a judicial reform and enactment of legal reform in the 1870s.

21) The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery is narrated by the eponymous David Copperfield. It is categorized as bildungsroman and published in the serial form between 1849 and 1850.

22) It is modelled on 18th century ‘personal histories’ that were very popular like Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones.

23) Oliver Twist; or The Parish Boy’s Progress is the second novel by English author Charles Dickens published as a serial from 1837 to 1839. The story follows the titular orphan, who, after being raised in a workhouse, escapes to juvenile pickpockets led by the elderly criminal Fagin, discovers the secrets of his parentage, and reconnects with his remaining family.

24) The alternative title, The Parish Boy’s Progress, alludes to Bunyan’s The Pilgrim Progress as well as the 18th-century caricature series by painter William Hogarth, A Rake’s Progress and Harlot’s Progress. The novel may have been inspired by the story of Robert Blincoe, an account of working as a child laborer in a cotton mill was widely read in the 1830s.

25) Oliver Twist has been a subject of numerous adaptations including a 1948 film of the same title.  A highly successful, Oliver! (1968) and Disney animation in 1988.