Dickens' Fur Coat and Charlotte's Unanswered Letters

In his bestselling What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew, Daniel Pool brilliantly unlocked the mysteries of the English novel. Now, in his long-awaited Dickens' Fur Coat and Charlotte's Unanswered Letters, Pool turns his keen eye to England's great Victorian novelists themselves, to reveal the surprisingly human private side of their public genius. Dickens' Fur Coat and Charlotte's Unanswered Letters explores the outrageous publicity stunts, bitter rivalries, rows, and general mayhem perpetrated by this group of supposedly prudish - yet remarkably passionate and eccentric - authors and publishers. Against a vividly painted backdrop of London as the small world it once was, the book brings on the players in the ever-changing, brave new world of big publishing - a world that gave birth to author tours, big advances, "trashy" fiction, flashy bookstalls in train stations (for Victorian "airport fiction"), celebrity libel suits, bogus blurbs, even paper recycling (as unsold volumes reappeared as trunk linings, fish wrappings, and fertilizer).

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.