Quote:
Originally Posted by mr ploppy
But how many of them started out writing because they saw it as a way of making money? And how do their "written for money" books compare to their earlier ones?
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Dickens was obsessed by money, even when he'd become a wealthy man, as a result of his own childhood experiences of poverty. He started writing as a parliamentary reporter, and, indeed, was a journalist as well as a novelist throughout his life, a fact which people sometimes forget today.
I think most people would say that Dickens became a significantly better writer over the course of his life. His later novels are a lot better plotted and written than his early books. But make no mistake about it, Dickens was writing the mass entertainment of his day. His novels, serialised in weekly magazines, were very much written for the commercial market. Like Shakespeare, he was writing as a commercial proposition, not as "art".