In 1836, Charles Dickens published the first of The Pickwick Papers, becoming an overnight, international literary sensation. In the nearly two centuries since, he has remained one of the world’s most widely read authors. In The Bedside, Bathtub and Armchair Companion to Dickens, Loyola Writing Professor Brian Murray takes a wide-ranging look at the great novelist’s life and career, from his politics to his Christian faith to his pragmatic, yet hopeful, worldview.

The book, to be published this month by Continuum, sheds light on Dickens’ role as both polemicist and journalist, revealing and considering his most persistent literary themes and analyzing how his politics, seen as radical at the time, provoked both admiration and scorn among his contemporaries.

“Dickens’ novels are often right in synch with today’s headlines,” said Murray. “For example, in Little Dorrit, Mr. Merdle beguiles the rich and famous with the unmatched success of his investments—until it’s learned that he’s running a vast Ponzi scheme. Dickens was obsessed with money and the many ways it can distort people’s lives. Dickens’ works also offer vivid depictions, funny and sad, of life’s endless themes. The Old Curiosity Shop, hugely popular with Victorian readers, continues to endure as a darkly comic portrait of the battle between good and evil in an often heartless world.”

Murray, author of H.G. Wells (1990) and Charles Dickens (1995), teaches a wide range of Loyola courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, including Writing about Film, Art of Prose: Charles Dickens, The History of the Essay, Editorial and Opinion Writing, and The Art of Argument.