The Dickens Boy by Tom Keneally

Book Description

Secondhand. Good condition. Wear to book corners and edges.

In the late 1800s, rather than run the risk of your under-achieving children tarnishing your reputation at home, you sent them to the colonies. At least, that is what Charles Dickens did with two of his boys, and Trollope did it too.

In this joyful novel, our narrator is Charles Dickens's tenth child, Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, known as Plorn. Sent, as his brother Alfred had been before him, at sixteen years of age, to Australia to learn to 'apply himself'. We follow his early Australian adventures in outback NSW, learning to become a man from the most diverse and toughest men.

Plorn arrived in Melbourne in late 1868 carrying a terrible secret. He has never read a word of his father's work. After a very brief stopover, he is sent out to become a gentleman stockman on a 2000 square mile station in the remotest, semi-arid parts of NSW. Here he inevitably gets enmeshed with Paakantji, colonists, colonial-born, ex-convicts, ex-soldiers, and very few women.

Against this backdrop, and featuring cricket tournaments, horse racing, bushrangers, sheep droving, shifty stock and station agents, frontier wars and first encounters with Australian women, we follow Dicken's son Plorn, and sometimes his brother Alfred, through wonderful adventures.

This is Tom Keneally in his most familiar terrain, taking historical figures and events and reimagining them with verve, compassion and humour. It is a romp. (back cover)