Book Review / Books and Reading

Hunted Down by Charles Dickens

by Deacon Nick · December 22, 2017

Hunted Down by Charles Dickens is a novella divided into five parts and recently published as a stand-alone Kindle ebook from Open Road Media. Hunted Down has all the hallmarks of a Dickens story: characters with evocative names (Julius Slinkton, Miss Niner), wonderful Victorian sentences, and a mysterious plot. Unfortunately, the mystery takes a while to get going and the climax isn’t up to Dickens’ typical standards. Still, it didn’t take long to read, it only cost me 99 cents, and the story wasn’t horrible, only disappointingly average.

For a thorough analysis of Hunted Down (which is almost as long as the story itself!), see Dickens’s “Hunted Down” (1859): A First-Person Narrative of Poisoning and Life-Insurance Fraud Influenced by Wilkie Collins at VictorianWeb.

Hunted Down by Charles Dickens
First published in New York Ledger, 1859
Kindle edition Open Road Media, 2015
Printed length: 29 pages

Tags: book recommendations book reviews Charles Dickens

Deacon Nick

Nick Senger is a husband, a father of four, a Roman Catholic deacon and a Catholic school principal. He taught junior high literature and writing for over 25 years, and has been a Catholic school educator since 1990. In 2001 he was named a Distinguished Teacher of the Year by the National Catholic Education Association.