Dickens in New York, circa 1867–1868
|Born||Charles John Huffam Dickens|
7 February 1812
Landport, Hampshire, England
|Died||9 June 1870 (aged 58)|
Higham, Kent, England
|Resting place||Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, England|
Catherine Thomson Hogarth
(m. 1836; sep. 1858)
(1857–1870, his death)
Charles John Huffam Dickens //; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, and by the 20th century, critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are still widely read today.(
Born in Portsmouth, Dickens left school to work in a factory when his father was incarcerated in a debtors' prison. Despite his lack of formal education, he edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed readings extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, education, and other social reforms.
Dickens's literary success began with the 1836 serial publication of The Pickwick Papers. Within a few years he had become an international literary celebrity, famous for his humour, satire, and keen observation of character and society. His novels, most published in monthly or weekly instalments, pioneered the serial publication of narrative fiction, which became the dominant Victorian mode for novel publication. Cliffhanger endings in his serial publications kept readers in suspense. The installment format allowed Dickens to evaluate his audience's reaction, and he often modified his plot and character development based on such feedback. For example, when his wife's chiropodist expressed distress at the way Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield seemed to reflect her disabilities, Dickens improved the character with positive features. His plots were carefully constructed, and he often wove elements from topical events into his narratives. Masses of the illiterate poor chipped in ha'pennies to have each new monthly episode read to them, opening up and inspiring a new class of readers.
His 1843 novella A Christmas Carol remains especially popular and continues to inspire adaptations in every artistic genre. Oliver Twist and Great Expectations are also frequently adapted and, like many of his novels, evoke images of early Victorian London. His 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities (set in London and Paris) is his best-known work of historical fiction. The most famous celebrity of his era, he undertook in response to public demand, a series of public reading tours in the later part of his career. Dickens has been praised by many of his fellow writers—from Leo Tolstoy to George Orwell, G. K. Chesterton, and Tom Wolfe—for his realism, comedy, prose style, unique characterisations, and social criticism. However, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf complained of a lack of psychological depth, loose writing, and a vein of sentimentalism.
The term Dickensian is used to describe something that is reminiscent of Dickens and his writings, such as poor social conditions or comically repulsive characters.
- 1 Early years
- 2 Journalism and early novels
- 3 First visit to the United States
- 4 Philanthropy
- 5 Religious views
- 6 Middle years
- 7 Last years
- 8 Second visit to the United States
- 9 Farewell readings
- 10 Death
- 11 Literary style
- 12 Reputation
- 13 Influence and legacy
- 14 Notable works
- 15 See also
- 16 References
- 17 Further reading
- 18 External links
Charles John Huffam Dickens was born on 7 February 1812, at 1 Mile End Terrace (now 393 Commercial Road), Landport in Portsea Island (Portsmouth), the second of eight children of Elizabeth Dickens (née Barrow; 1789–1863) and John Dickens (1785–1851). His father was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office and was temporarily stationed in the district. He asked Christopher Huffam, rigger to His Majesty's Navy, gentleman, and head of an established firm, to act as godfather to Charles. Huffam is thought to be the inspiration for Paul Dombey, the owner of a shipping company in Dickens's novel Dombey and Son (1848).
In January 1815, John Dickens was called back to London, and the family moved to Norfolk Street, Fitzrovia. When Charles was four, they relocated to Sheerness, and thence to Chatham, Kent, where he spent his formative years until the age of 11. His early life seems to have been idyllic, though he thought himself a "very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy".
Charles spent time outdoors, but also read voraciously, including the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding, as well as Robinson Crusoe and Gil Blas. He read and reread The Arabian Nights and the Collected Farces of Elizabeth Inchbald. He retained poignant memories of childhood, helped by an excellent memory of people and events, which he used in his writing. His father's brief work as a clerk in the Navy Pay Office afforded him a few years of private education, first at a dame school, and then at a school run by William Giles, a dissenter, in Chatham.
This period came to an end in June 1822, when John Dickens was recalled to Navy Pay Office headquarters at Somerset House, and the family (except for Charles, who stayed behind to finish his final term of work) moved to Camden Town in London. The family had left Kent amidst rapidly mounting debts, and, living beyond his means, John Dickens was forced by his creditors into the Marshalsea debtors' prison in Southwark, London in 1824. His wife and youngest children joined him there, as was the practice at the time. Charles, then 12 years old, boarded with Elizabeth Roylance, a family friend, at 112 College Place, Camden Town. Roylance was "a reduced [impoverished] old lady, long known to our family", whom Dickens later immortalised, "with a few alterations and embellishments", as "Mrs Pipchin" in Dombey and Son. Later, he lived in a back-attic in the house of an agent for the Insolvent Court, Archibald Russell, "a fat, good-natured, kind old gentleman... with a quiet old wife" and lame son, in Lant Street in Southwark. They provided the inspiration for the Garlands in The Old Curiosity Shop.
On Sundays—with his sister Frances, free from her studies at the Royal Academy of Music—he spent the day at the Marshalsea. Dickens later used the prison as a setting in Little Dorrit. To pay for his board and to help his family, Dickens was forced to leave school and work ten-hour days at Warren's Blacking Warehouse, on Hungerford Stairs, near the present Charing Cross railway station, where he earned six shillings a week pasting labels on pots of boot blacking. The strenuous and often harsh working conditions made a lasting impression on Dickens and later influenced his fiction and essays, becoming the foundation of his interest in the reform of socio-economic and labour conditions, the rigours of which he believed were unfairly borne by the poor. He later wrote that he wondered "how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age". As he recalled to John Forster (from The Life of Charles Dickens):
The blacking-warehouse was the last house on the left-hand side of the way, at old Hungerford Stairs. It was a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscoted rooms, and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again. The counting-house was on the first floor, looking over the coal-barges and the river. There was a recess in it, in which I was to sit and work. My work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking; first with a piece of oil-paper, and then with a piece of blue paper; to tie them round with a string; and then to clip the paper close and neat, all round, until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary's shop. When a certain number of grosses of pots had attained this pitch of perfection, I was to paste on each a printed label, and then go on again with more pots. Two or three other boys were kept at similar duty down-stairs on similar wages. One of them came up, in a ragged apron and a paper cap, on the first Monday morning, to show me the trick of using the string and tying the knot. His name was Bob Fagin; and I took the liberty of using his name, long afterwards, in Oliver Twist.
When the warehouse was moved to Chandos Street in the smart, busy district of Covent Garden the boys worked in a room in which the window gave onto the street and little audiences gathered and watched them at work—in Dickens biographer Simon Callow's estimation, the public display was "a new refinement added to his misery".
A few months after his imprisonment, John Dickens's mother, Elizabeth Dickens, died and bequeathed him £450. On the expectation of this legacy, Dickens was released from prison. Under the Insolvent Debtors Act, Dickens arranged for payment of his creditors, and he and his family left Marshalsea, for the home of Mrs Roylance.
Charles's mother, Elizabeth Dickens, did not immediately support his removal from the boot-blacking warehouse. This influenced Dickens's view that a father should rule the family, and a mother find her proper sphere inside the home: "I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back". His mother's failure to request his return was a factor in his dissatisfied attitude towards women.
Righteous indignation stemming from his own situation and the conditions under which working-class people lived became major themes of his works, and it was this unhappy period in his youth to which he alluded in his favourite, and most autobiographical, novel, David Copperfield: "I had no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no assistance, no support, of any kind, from anyone, that I can call to mind, as I hope to go to heaven!"
Dickens was eventually sent to the Wellington House Academy in Camden Town, where he remained until March 1827, having spent about two years there. He did not consider it to be a good school: "Much of the haphazard, desultory teaching, poor discipline punctuated by the headmaster's sadistic brutality, the seedy ushers and general run-down atmosphere, are embodied in Mr Creakle's Establishment in David Copperfield."
Dickens worked at the law office of Ellis and Blackmore, attorneys, of Holborn Court, Gray's Inn, as a junior clerk from May 1827 to November 1828. He was a gifted mimic and impersonated those around him: clients, lawyers, and clerks. He went to theatres obsessively—he claimed that for at least three years he went to the theatre every single day. His favourite actor was Charles Mathews, and Dickens learnt his monopolylogues, (farces in which Mathews played every character), by heart. Then, having learned Gurney's system of shorthand in his spare time, he left to become a freelance reporter. A distant relative, Thomas Charlton, was a freelance reporter at Doctors' Commons, and Dickens was able to share his box there to report the legal proceedings for nearly four years. This education was to inform works such as Nicholas Nickleby, Dombey and Son, and especially Bleak House—whose vivid portrayal of the machinations and bureaucracy of the legal system did much to enlighten the general public and served as a vehicle for dissemination of Dickens's own views regarding, particularly, the heavy burden on the poor who were forced by circumstances to "go to law".
In 1830, Dickens met his first love, Maria Beadnell, thought to have been the model for the character Dora in David Copperfield. Maria's parents disapproved of the courtship and ended the relationship by sending her to school in Paris.
Journalism and early novels
In 1832, at age 20, Dickens was energetic and increasingly self-confident. He enjoyed mimicry and popular entertainment, lacked a clear, specific sense of what he wanted to become, and yet knew he wanted fame. Drawn to the theatre—he became an early member of the Garrick—he landed an acting audition at Covent Garden, where the manager George Bartley and the actor Charles Kemble were to see him. Dickens prepared meticulously and decided to imitate the comedian Charles Mathews, but ultimately he missed the audition because of a cold. Before another opportunity arose, he had set out on his career as a writer. In 1833, he submitted his first story, "A Dinner at Poplar Walk", to the London periodical Monthly Magazine. William Barrow, a brother of his mother, offered him a job on The Mirror of Parliament and he worked in the House of Commons for the first time early in 1832. He rented rooms at Furnival's Inn and worked as a political journalist, reporting on Parliamentary debates, and he travelled across Britain to cover election campaigns for the Morning Chronicle. His journalism, in the form of sketches in periodicals, formed his first collection of pieces, published in 1836: Sketches by Boz—Boz being a family nickname he employed as a pseudonym for some years. Dickens apparently adopted it from the nickname "Moses", which he had given to his youngest brother Augustus Dickens, after a character in Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield. When pronounced by anyone with a head cold, "Moses" became "Boses"—later shortened to Boz. Dickens's own name was considered "queer" by a contemporary critic, who wrote in 1849: "Mr Dickens, as if in revenge for his own queer name, does bestow still queerer ones upon his fictitious creations." He contributed to and edited journals throughout his literary career. In January 1835, the Morning Chronicle launched an evening edition, under the editorship of the Chronicle's music critic, George Hogarth. Hogarth invited Dickens to contribute Street Sketches and Dickens became a regular visitor to his Fulham house, excited by Hogarth's friendship with a hero of his, Walter Scott, and enjoying the company of Hogarth's three daughters—Georgina, Mary, and nineteen-year-old Catherine.
Dickens made rapid progress both professionally and socially. He began a friendship with William Harrison Ainsworth, the author of the highwayman novel Rookwood (1834), whose bachelor salon in Harrow Road had become the meeting place for a set that included Daniel Maclise, Benjamin Disraeli, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and George Cruikshank. All these became his friends and collaborators, with the exception of Disraeli, and he met his first publisher, John Macrone, at the house. The success of Sketches by Boz led to a proposal from publishers Chapman and Hall for Dickens to supply text to match Robert Seymour's engraved illustrations in a monthly letterpress. Seymour committed suicide after the second instalment, and Dickens, who wanted to write a connected series of sketches, hired "Phiz" to provide the engravings (which were reduced from four to two per instalment) for the story. The resulting story became The Pickwick Papers, and though the first few episodes were not successful, the introduction of the Cockney character Sam Weller in the fourth episode (the first to be illustrated by Phiz) marked a sharp climb in its popularity. The final instalment sold 40,000 copies.
In November 1836, Dickens accepted the position of editor of Bentley's Miscellany, a position he held for three years, until he fell out with the owner. In 1836 as he finished the last instalments of The Pickwick Papers, he began writing the beginning instalments of Oliver Twist—writing as many as 90 pages a month—while continuing work on Bentley's and also writing four plays, the production of which he oversaw. Oliver Twist, published in 1838, became one of Dickens's better known stories, and was the first Victorian novel with a child protagonist.
On 2 April 1836, after a one-year engagement, and between episodes two and three of The Pickwick Papers, Dickens married Catherine Thomson Hogarth (1816–1879), the daughter of George Hogarth, editor of the Evening Chronicle. They were married in St. Luke's Church, Chelsea, London. After a brief honeymoon in Chalk in Kent, the couple returned to lodgings at Furnival's Inn. The first of their ten children, Charley, was born in January 1837, and a few months later the family set up home in Bloomsbury at 48 Doughty Street, London, (on which Charles had a three-year lease at £80 a year) from 25 March 1837 until December 1839. Dickens's younger brother Frederick and Catherine's 17-year-old sister Mary Hogarth moved in with them. Dickens became very attached to Mary, and she died in his arms after a brief illness in 1837. Unusually for Dickens, as a consequence of his shock, he stopped working, and he and Kate stayed at a little farm on Hampstead Heath for a fortnight. Dickens idealised Mary—the character he fashioned after her, Rose Maylie, he found he could not now kill, as he had planned, in his fiction, and, according to Ackroyd, he drew on memories of her for his later descriptions of Little Nell and Florence Dombey. His grief was so great that he was unable to meet the deadline for the June instalment of Pickwick Papers and had to cancel the Oliver Twist instalment that month as well. The time in Hampstead was the occasion for a growing bond between Dickens and John Forster to develop and Forster soon became his unofficial business manager, and the first to read his work.
His success as a novelist continued. The young Queen Victoria read both Oliver Twist and Pickwick, staying up until midnight to discuss them. Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41) and, finally, his first historical novel, Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty, as part of the Master Humphrey's Clock series (1840–41), were all published in monthly instalments before being made into books.
In the midst of all his activity during this period, there was discontent with his publishers and John Macrone was bought off, while Richard Bentley signed over all his rights in Oliver Twist. Other signs of a certain restlessness and discontent emerged—in Broadstairs he flirted with Eleanor Picken, the young fiancée of his solicitor's best friend, and one night grabbed her and ran with her down to the sea. He declared they were both to drown there in the "sad sea waves". She finally got free but afterwards kept her distance. In June 1841 he precipitously set out on a two-month tour of Scotland and then, in September 1841, telegraphed Forster that he had decided to go to America. Master Humphrey's Clock was shut down, though Dickens was still keen on the idea of the weekly magazine, a form he liked, a liking that had begun with his childhood reading of the eighteenth-century magazines Tatler and The Spectator.
Dickens was perturbed by the return to power of the Tories, whom Dickens described as "people whom, politically, I despise and abhor." He had been tempted to stand for the Liberals in Reading, but decided against it due to financial straits. He wrote three anti-Tory verse satires ("The Fine Old English Gentleman", "The Quack Doctor's Proclamation", and "Subjects for Painters") which were published in The Examiner.
First visit to the United States
On 22 January 1842, Dickens and his wife arrived in Boston, Massachusetts aboard the RMS Britannia during their first trip to the United States and Canada. At this time Georgina Hogarth, another sister of Catherine, joined the Dickens household, now living at Devonshire Terrace, Marylebone, to care for the young family they had left behind. She remained with them as housekeeper, organiser, adviser, and friend until Dickens's death in 1870. Dickens modelled the character of Agnes Wickfield after Georgina and Mary.
He described his impressions in a travelogue, American Notes for General Circulation. In Notes, Dickens includes a powerful condemnation of slavery which he had attacked as early as The Pickwick Papers, correlating the emancipation of the poor in England with the abolition of slavery abroad citing newspaper accounts of runaway slaves disfigured by their masters. In spite of the abolitionist sentiments gleaned from his trip to America, some modern commentators have pointed out inconsistencies in Dickens's views on racial inequality. For instance, he has been criticized for his subsequent acquiescence in Governor Eyre's harsh crackdown during the 1860s Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica and his failure to join other British progressives in condemning it. From Richmond, Virginia, Dickens returned to Washington, D.C., and started a trek westward to St. Louis, Missouri. While there, he expressed a desire to see an American prairie before returning east. A group of 13 men then set out with Dickens to visit Looking Glass Prairie, a trip 30 miles into Illinois.
During his American visit, Dickens spent a month in New York City, giving lectures, raising the question of international copyright laws and the pirating of his work in America. He persuaded a group of twenty-five writers, headed by Washington Irving, to sign a petition for him to take to Congress, but the press were generally hostile to this, saying that he should be grateful for his popularity and that it was mercenary to complain about his work being pirated.
The popularity he gained caused a shift in his self-perception according to critic Kate Flint, who writes that he "found himself a cultural commodity, and its circulation had passed out his control", causing him to become interested in and delve into themes of public and personal personas in the next novels. She writes that he assumed a role of "influential commentator", publicly and in his fiction, evident in his next few books. His trip to the U.S. ended with a trip to Canada: Niagara Falls, Toronto, Kingston and Montreal where he appeared on stage in light comedies.
Soon after his return to England, Dickens began work on the first of his Christmas stories, A Christmas Carol, written in 1843, which was followed by The Chimes in 1844 and The Cricket on the Hearth in 1845. Of these, A Christmas Carol was most popular and, tapping into an old tradition, did much to promote a renewed enthusiasm for the joys of Christmas in Britain and America. The seeds for the story became planted in Dickens's mind during a trip to Manchester to witness the conditions of the manufacturing workers there. This, along with scenes he had recently witnessed at the Field Lane Ragged School, caused Dickens to resolve to "strike a sledge hammer blow" for the poor. As the idea for the story took shape and the writing began in earnest, Dickens became engrossed in the book. He later wrote that as the tale unfolded he "wept and laughed, and wept again" as he "walked about the black streets of London fifteen or twenty miles many a night when all sober folks had gone to bed."
After living briefly in Italy (1844), Dickens travelled to Switzerland (1846), where he began work on Dombey and Son (1846–48). This and David Copperfield (1849–50) mark a significant artistic break in Dickens's career as his novels became more serious in theme and more carefully planned than his early works.
At about this time, he was made aware of a large embezzlement at the firm where his brother, Augustus, worked (John Chapman & Co.). It had been carried out by Thomas Powell, a clerk, who was on friendly terms with Dickens and who had acted as mentor to Augustus when he started work. Powell was also an author and poet and knew many of the famous writers of the day. After further fraudulent activities, Powell fled to New York and published a book called The Living Authors of England with a chapter on Charles Dickens, who was not amused by what Powell had written. One item that seemed to have annoyed him was the assertion that he had based the character of Paul Dombey (Dombey and Son) on Thomas Chapman, one of the principal partners at John Chapman & Co. Dickens immediately sent a letter to Lewis Gaylord Clark, editor of the New York literary magazine The Knickerbocker, saying that Powell was a forger and thief. Clark published the letter in the New-York Tribune, and several other papers picked up on the story. Powell began proceedings to sue these publications, and Clark was arrested. Dickens, realising that he had acted in haste, contacted John Chapman & Co. to seek written confirmation of Powell's guilt. Dickens did receive a reply confirming Powell's embezzlement, but once the directors realised this information might have to be produced in court, they refused to make further disclosures. Owing to the difficulties of providing evidence in America to support his accusations, Dickens eventually made a private settlement with Powell out of court.
Angela Burdett Coutts, heir to the Coutts banking fortune, approached Dickens in May 1846 about setting up a home for the redemption of fallen women of the working class. Coutts envisioned a home that would replace the punitive regimes of existing institutions with a reformative environment conducive to education and proficiency in domestic household chores. After initially resisting, Dickens eventually founded the home, named "Urania Cottage", in the Lime Grove section of Shepherds Bush, which he managed for ten years, setting the house rules, reviewing the accounts and interviewing prospective residents. Emigration and marriage were central to Dickens's agenda for the women on leaving Urania Cottage, from which it is estimated that about 100 women graduated between 1847 and 1859.
As a young man Dickens expressed a distaste for certain aspects of organised religion. In 1836, in a pamphlet titled Sunday Under Three Heads, he defended the people's right to pleasure, opposing a plan to prohibit games on Sundays. "Look into your churches- diminished congregations and scanty attendance. People have grown sullen and obstinate, and are becoming disgusted with the faith which condemns them to such a day as this, once in every seven. They display their feeling by staying away [from church]. Turn into the streets [on a Sunday] and mark the rigid gloom that reigns over everything around."
Dickens honoured the figure of Christ. Dickens is regarded as a professing Christian. His son, Henry Fielding Dickens, described Dickens as someone who "possessed deep religious convictions". In the early 1840s, Dickens had shown an interest in Unitarian Christianity, and Robert Browning remarked that “Mr Dickens is an enlightened Unitarian.” Professor Gary Colledge has written that he "never strayed from his attachment to popular lay Anglicanism". Dickens authored a work called The Life of Our Lord (1846), which is a book about the life of Jesus Christ, written with the purpose of sharing his faith with his children and family.
Dickens disapproved of Roman Catholicism and 19th-century evangelicalism, seeing both as extremes of Christianity and likely to limit personal expression, and was critical of what he saw as the hypocrisy of religious institutions and philosophies like spiritualism, all of which he considered deviations from the true spirit of Christianity, as shown in the book he wrote for his family in 1846. While Dickens advocated equal rights for Catholics in England, he strongly disliked how individual civil liberties were often threatened in countries where Catholicism predominated and referred to the Catholic Church as "that curse upon the world." Dickens also rejected the Evangelical conviction that the Bible was the infallible word of God. His ideas on Biblical interpretation were similar to the Liberal Anglican Arthur Penrhyn Stanley's doctrine of "progressive revelation." Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky referred to Dickens as "that great Christian writer".
In December 1845, Dickens took up the editorship of the London-based Daily News, a liberal paper through which Dickens hoped to advocate, in his own words, "the Principles of Progress and Improvement, of Education and Civil and Religious Liberty and Equal Legislation." Among the other contributors Dickens chose to write for the paper were the radical economist Thomas Hodgskin and social reformer Douglas William Jerrold, who frequently attacked the Corn Laws. Dickens lasted only ten weeks on the job before resigning due to a combination of exhaustion and frustration with one of the paper's co-owners.
The Francophile Dickens often holidayed in France, and in a speech delivered in Paris in 1846 in French called the French "the first people in the universe". During his visit to Paris, Dickens met the French literati Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Eugène Scribe, Théophile Gautier, François-René de Chateaubriand and Eugène Sue. In early 1849, Dickens started to write David Copperfield. It was published between 1849 and 1850. In Dickens’ biography, Life of Charles Dickens (1872), John Forster wrote of David Copperfield, “underneath the fiction lay something of the author’s life.” It was Dickens's personal favourite among his own novels, as he wrote in the author's preface to the 1867 edition of the novel.
In late November 1851, Dickens moved into Tavistock House where he wrote Bleak House (1852–53), Hard Times (1854), and Little Dorrit (1856). It was here that he indulged in the amateur theatricals described in Forster's Life. During this period he worked closely with the novelist and playwright Wilkie Collins. In 1856, his income from writing allowed him to buy Gad's Hill Place in Higham, Kent. As a child, Dickens had walked past the house and dreamed of living in it. The area was also the scene of some of the events of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1, and this literary connection pleased him.
During this time Dickens was also the publisher, editor, and a major contributor to the journals Household Words (1850–1859) and All the Year Round (1858–1870). In 1855, when Dickens's good friend and Liberal MP Austen Henry Layard formed an Administrative Reform Association to demand significant reforms of Parliament, Dickens joined and volunteered his resources in support of Layard's cause. With the exception of Lord John Russell, who was the only leading politician in whom Dickens had any faith and to whom he later dedicated A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens believed that the political aristocracy and their incompetence were the death of England. When he and Layard were accused of fomenting class conflict, Dickens replied that the classes were already in opposition and the fault was with the aristocratic class. Dickens used his pulpit in Household Words to champion the Reform Association. He also commented on foreign affairs, declaring his support for Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini, helping raise funds for their campaigns, and stating that "a united Italy would be of vast importance to the peace of the world, and would be a rock in Louis Napoleon's way," and that "I feel for Italy almost as if I were an Italian born."
In 1857, Dickens hired professional actresses for the play The Frozen Deep, written by him and his protégé, Wilkie Collins. Dickens fell in love with one of the actresses, Ellen Ternan, and this passion was to last the rest of his life. Dickens was 45 and Ternan 18 when he made the decision, which went strongly against Victorian convention, to separate from his wife, Catherine, in 1858—divorce was still unthinkable for someone as famous as he was. When Catherine left, never to see her husband again, she took with her one child, leaving the other children to be raised by her sister Georgina who chose to stay at Gad's Hill.
During this period, whilst pondering a project to give public readings for his own profit, Dickens was approached through a charitable appeal by Great Ormond Street Hospital, to help it survive its first major financial crisis. His 'Drooping Buds' essay in Household Words earlier on 3 April 1852 was considered by the hospital's founders to have been the catalyst for the hospital's success. Dickens, whose philanthropy was well-known, was asked by his friend, the hospital's founder Charles West, to preside over the appeal, and he threw himself into the task, heart and soul. Dickens's public readings secured sufficient funds for an endowment to put the hospital on a sound financial footing—one reading on 9 February 1858 alone raised £3,000.
After separating from Catherine, Dickens undertook a series of hugely popular and remunerative reading tours which, together with his journalism, were to absorb most of his creative energies for the next decade, in which he was to write only two more novels. His first reading tour, lasting from April 1858 to February 1859, consisted of 129 appearances in 49 different towns throughout England, Scotland and Ireland. Dickens's continued fascination with the theatrical world was written into the theatre scenes in Nicholas Nickleby, but more importantly he found an outlet in public readings. In 1866, he undertook a series of public readings in England and Scotland, with more the following year in England and Ireland.
Other works soon followed, including A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations (1861), which were resounding successes. Set in London and Paris, A Tale of Two Cities is his best-known work of historical fiction, and with over 200 million copies sold it is regularly cited as the best-selling novel of all time. Themes in Great Expectations include wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the eventual triumph of good over evil.
In early September 1860, in a field behind Gad's Hill, Dickens made a bonfire of most of his correspondence—only those letters on business matters were spared. Since Ellen Ternan also destroyed all of his letters to her, the extent of the affair between the two remains speculative. In the 1930s, Thomas Wright recounted that Ternan had unburdened herself to a Canon Benham, and gave currency to rumours they had been lovers. That the two had a son who died in infancy was alleged by Dickens's daughter, Kate Perugini, whom Gladys Storey had interviewed before her death in 1929. Storey published her account in Dickens and Daughter, but no contemporary evidence exists. On his death, Dickens settled an annuity on Ternan which made her a financially independent woman. Claire Tomalin's book, The Invisible Woman, argues that Ternan lived with Dickens secretly for the last 13 years of his life. The book was subsequently turned into a play, Little Nell, by Simon Gray, and a 2013 film. In the same period, Dickens furthered his interest in the paranormal, becoming one of the early members of The Ghost Club.
In June 1862, he was offered £10,000 for a reading tour of Australia. He was enthusiastic, and even planned a travel book, The Uncommercial Traveller Upside Down, but ultimately decided against the tour. Two of his sons, Alfred D'Orsay Tennyson Dickens and Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, migrated to Australia, Edward becoming a member of the Parliament of New South Wales as Member for Wilcannia between 1889 and 1894.
On 9 June 1865, while returning from Paris with Ellen Ternan, Dickens was involved in the Staplehurst rail crash. The train's first seven carriages plunged off a cast iron bridge that was under repair. The only first-class carriage to remain on the track was the one in which Dickens was travelling. Before rescuers arrived, Dickens tended and comforted the wounded and the dying with a flask of brandy and a hat refreshed with water, and saved some lives. Before leaving, he remembered the unfinished manuscript for Our Mutual Friend, and he returned to his carriage to retrieve it.
Dickens later used the experience of the crash as material for his short ghost story, "The Signal-Man", in which the central character has a premonition of his own death in a rail crash. He also based the story on several previous rail accidents, such as the Clayton Tunnel rail crash of 1861. Dickens managed to avoid an appearance at the inquest to avoid disclosing that he had been travelling with Ternan and her mother, which would have caused a scandal. After the crash Dickens was nervous when travelling by train, and would use alternative means when available. In 1868 he wrote, “I have sudden vague rushes of terror, even when riding in a hansom cab, which are perfectly unreasonable but quite insurmountable." Dickens's son, Henry, recalled, "I have seen him sometimes in a railway carriage when there was a slight jolt. When this happened he was almost in a state of panic and gripped the seat with both hands."
Second visit to the United States
While he contemplated a second visit to the United States, the outbreak of the Civil War in America in 1861 delayed his plans. On 9 November 1867, over two years after the war, Dickens set sail from Liverpool for his second American reading tour. Landing in Boston, he devoted the rest of the month to a round of dinners with such notables as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and his American publisher, James Thomas Fields. In early December, the readings began. He performed 76 readings, netting £19,000, from December 1867 to April 1868. Dickens shuttled between Boston and New York, where he gave 22 readings at Steinway Hall. Although he had started to suffer from what he called the "true American catarrh", he kept to a schedule that would have challenged a much younger man, even managing to squeeze in some sleighing in Central Park.
During his travels, he saw a change in the people and the circumstances of America. His final appearance was at a banquet the American Press held in his honour at Delmonico's on 18 April, when he promised never to denounce America again. By the end of the tour Dickens could hardly manage solid food, subsisting on champagne and eggs beaten in sherry. On 23 April he boarded the Cunard liner Russia to return to Britain, barely escaping a federal tax lien against the proceeds of his lecture tour.
Between 1868 and 1869, Dickens gave a series of "farewell readings" in England, Scotland, and Ireland, beginning on 6 October. He managed, of a contracted 100 readings, to deliver 75 in the provinces, with a further 12 in London. As he pressed on he was affected by giddiness and fits of paralysis. He suffered a stroke on 18 April 1869 in Chester. He collapsed on 22 April 1869, at Preston in Lancashire, and on doctor's advice, the tour was cancelled. After further provincial readings were cancelled, he began work on his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. It was fashionable in the 1860s to 'do the slums' and, in company, Dickens visited opium dens in Shadwell, where he witnessed an elderly addict known as "Laskar Sal", who formed the model for the "Opium Sal" subsequently featured in his mystery novel, Edwin Drood.
After Dickens had regained sufficient strength, he arranged, with medical approval, for a final series of readings to partially make up to his sponsors what they had lost due to his illness. There were 12 performances, running between 11 January and 15 March 1870, the last at 8:00 pm at St. James's Hall in London. Although in grave health by this time, he read A Christmas Carol and The Trial from Pickwick. On 2 May, he made his last public appearance at a Royal Academy Banquet in the presence of the Prince and Princess of Wales, paying a special tribute on the death of his friend, the illustrator Daniel Maclise.
On 8 June 1870, Dickens suffered another stroke at his home after a full day's work on Edwin Drood. He never regained consciousness, and the next day, five years to the day after the Staplehurst rail crash, he died at Gads Hill Place. Biographer Claire Tomalin has suggested Dickens was actually in Peckham when he suffered the stroke, and his mistress Ellen Ternan and her maids had him taken back to Gad's Hill so the public would not know the truth about their relationship. Contrary to his wish to be buried at Rochester Cathedral "in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner", he was laid to rest in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. A printed epitaph circulated at the time of the funeral reads:
To the Memory of Charles Dickens (England's most popular author) who died at his residence, Higham, near Rochester, Kent, 9 June 1870, aged 58 years. He was a sympathiser with the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest writers is lost to the world.
His last words were: "On the ground", in response to his sister-in-law Georgina's request that he lie down.[nb 1] On Sunday, 19 June 1870, five days after Dickens was buried in the Abbey, Dean Arthur Penrhyn Stanley delivered a memorial elegy, lauding "the genial and loving humorist whom we now mourn", for showing by his own example "that even in dealing with the darkest scenes and the most degraded characters, genius could still be clean, and mirth could be innocent". Pointing to the fresh flowers that adorned the novelist's grave, Stanley assured those present that "the spot would thenceforth be a sacred one with both the New World and the Old, as that of the representative of literature, not of this island only, but of all who speak our English tongue."
In his will, drafted more than a year before his death, Dickens left the care of his £80,000 estate to his longtime colleague John Forster and his "best and truest friend" Georgina Hogarth who, along with Dickens's two sons, also received a tax-free sum of £8,000 (about £800,000 in present terms). Although Dickens and his wife had been separated for several years at the time of his death, he provided her with an annual income of £600 and made her similar allowances in his will. He also bequeathed £19 19s to each servant in his employment at the time of his death.
Dickens's approach to the novel is influenced by various things, including the picaresque novel tradition, melodrama, and the novel of sensibility. According to Ackroyd, other than these, perhaps the most important literary influence on him was derived from the fables of The Arabian Nights. Satire and irony are central to the picaresque novel. Comedy is also an aspect of the British picaresque novel tradition of Laurence Sterne, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett. Fielding's Tom Jones was a major influence on the nineteenth novel including Dickens, who read it in his youth, and named a son Henry Fielding Dickens in his honour. Melodrama is typically sensational and designed to appeal strongly to the emotions.
His writing style is marked by a profuse linguistic creativity. Satire, flourishing in his gift for caricature, is his forte. An early reviewer compared him to Hogarth for his keen practical sense of the ludicrous side of life, though his acclaimed mastery of varieties of class idiom may in fact mirror the conventions of contemporary popular theatre. Dickens worked intensively on developing arresting names for his characters that would reverberate with associations for his readers, and assist the development of motifs in the storyline, giving what one critic calls an "allegorical impetus" to the novels' meanings. To cite one of numerous examples, the name Mr Murdstone in David Copperfield conjures up twin allusions to "murder" and stony coldness. His literary style is also a mixture of fantasy and realism. His satires of British aristocratic snobbery—he calls one character the "Noble Refrigerator"—are often popular. Comparing orphans to stocks and shares, people to tug boats, or dinner-party guests to furniture are just some of Dickens's acclaimed flights of fancy.
The author worked closely with his illustrators, supplying them with a summary of the work at the outset and thus ensuring that his characters and settings were exactly how he envisioned them. He briefed the illustrator on plans for each month's instalment so that work could begin before he wrote them. Marcus Stone, illustrator of Our Mutual Friend, recalled that the author was always "ready to describe down to the minutest details the personal characteristics, and ... life-history of the creations of his fancy".
Dickens's biographer Claire Tomalin regards him as the greatest creator of character in English fiction after Shakespeare. Dickensian characters are amongst the most memorable in English literature, especially so because of their typically whimsical names. The likes of Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Jacob Marley and Bob Cratchit (A Christmas Carol), Oliver Twist, The Artful Dodger, Fagin and Bill Sikes (Oliver Twist), Pip, Miss Havisham and Abel Magwitch (Great Expectations), Sydney Carton, Charles Darnay and Madame Defarge (A Tale of Two Cities), David Copperfield, Uriah Heep and Mr Micawber (David Copperfield), Daniel Quilp (The Old Curiosity Shop), Samuel Pickwick and Sam Weller (The Pickwick Papers), and Wackford Squeers (Nicholas Nickleby) are so well known as to be part and parcel of popular culture, and in some cases have passed into ordinary language: a scrooge, for example, is a miser – or someone who dislikes Christmas festivity.
His characters were often so memorable that they took on a life of their own outside his books. "Gamp" became a slang expression for an umbrella from the character Mrs Gamp, and "Pickwickian", "Pecksniffian", and "Gradgrind" all entered dictionaries due to Dickens's original portraits of such characters who were, respectively, quixotic, hypocritical, and vapidly factual. Many were drawn from real life: Mrs Nickleby is based on his mother, though she didn't recognise herself in the portrait, just as Mr Micawber is constructed from aspects of his father's 'rhetorical exuberance': Harold Skimpole in Bleak House is based on James Henry Leigh Hunt: his wife's dwarfish chiropodist recognised herself in Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield. Perhaps Dickens's impressions on his meeting with Hans Christian Andersen informed the delineation of Uriah Heep (a term synonymous with sycophant).
Virginia Woolf maintained that "we remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens" as he produces "characters who exist not in detail, not accurately or exactly, but abundantly in a cluster of wild yet extraordinarily revealing remarks". T. S. Eliot wrote that Dickens “excelled in character; in the creation of characters of greater intensity than human beings.” One "character" vividly drawn throughout his novels is London itself. Dickens described London as a magic lantern, inspiring the places and people in many of his novels. From the coaching inns on the outskirts of the city to the lower reaches of the Thames, all aspects of the capital – Dickens' London – are described over the course of his body of work.
Authors frequently draw their portraits of characters from people they have known in real life. David Copperfield is regarded by many as a veiled autobiography of Dickens. The scenes of interminable court cases and legal arguments in Bleak House reflect Dickens's experiences as a law clerk and court reporter, and in particular his direct experience of the law's procedural delay during 1844 when he sued publishers in Chancery for breach of copyright. Dickens's father was sent to prison for debt, and this became a common theme in many of his books, with the detailed depiction of life in the Marshalsea prison in Little Dorrit resulting from Dickens's own experiences of the institution. Lucy Stroughill, a childhood sweetheart, may have affected several of Dickens's portraits of girls such as Little Em'ly in David Copperfield and Lucie Manette in A Tale of Two Cities.[nb 2]
Dickens may have drawn on his childhood experiences, but he was also ashamed of them and would not reveal that this was where he gathered his realistic accounts of squalor. Very few knew the details of his early life until six years after his death, when John Forster published a biography on which Dickens had collaborated. Though Skimpole brutally sends up Leigh Hunt, some critics have detected in his portrait features of Dickens's own character, which he sought to exorcise by self-parody.
A pioneer of serialised fiction, most of Dickens's major novels were first written in monthly or weekly instalments in journals such as Master Humphrey's Clock and Household Words, later reprinted in book form. These instalments made the stories affordable and accessible, and the series of regular cliffhangers made each new episode widely anticipated. When The Old Curiosity Shop was being serialised, American fans waited at the docks in New York harbor, shouting out to the crew of an incoming British ship, "Is little Nell dead?" Dickens's talent was to incorporate this episodic writing style but still end up with a coherent novel at the end.
Another important impact of Dickens's episodic writing style resulted from his exposure to the opinions of his readers and friends. His friend Forster had a significant hand in reviewing his drafts, an influence that went beyond matters of punctuation. He toned down melodramatic and sensationalist exaggerations, cut long passages (such as the episode of Quilp's drowning in The Old Curiosity Shop), and made suggestions about plot and character. It was he who suggested that Charley Bates should be redeemed in Oliver Twist. Dickens had not thought of killing Little Nell, and it was Forster who advised him to entertain this possibility as necessary to his conception of the heroine.
Dickens's serialisation of his novels was criticised by other authors. In Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson's novel The Wrecker, there is a comment by Captain Nares, investigating an abandoned ship: "See! They were writing up the log," said Nares, pointing to the ink-bottle. "Caught napping, as usual. I wonder if there ever was a captain yet that lost a ship with his log-book up to date? He generally has about a month to fill up on a clean break, like Charles Dickens and his serial novels."
Dickens's novels were, among other things, works of social commentary. He was a fierce critic of the poverty and social stratification of Victorian society. In a New York address, he expressed his belief that "Virtue shows quite as well in rags and patches as she does in purple and fine linen". Dickens's second novel, Oliver Twist (1839), shocked readers with its images of poverty and crime: it challenged middle class polemics about criminals, making impossible any pretence to ignorance about what poverty entailed.
At a time when Britain was the major economic and political power of the world, Dickens highlighted the life of the forgotten poor and disadvantaged within society. Through his journalism he campaigned on specific issues—such as sanitation and the workhouse—but his fiction probably demonstrated its greatest prowess in changing public opinion in regard to class inequalities. He often depicted the exploitation and oppression of the poor and condemned the public officials and institutions that not only allowed such abuses to exist, but flourished as a result. His most strident indictment of this condition is in Hard Times (1854), Dickens's only novel-length treatment of the industrial working class. In this work, he uses vitriol and satire to illustrate how this marginalised social stratum was termed "Hands" by the factory owners; that is, not really "people" but rather only appendages of the machines they operated. His writings inspired others, in particular journalists and political figures, to address such problems of class oppression. For example, the prison scenes in The Pickwick Papers are claimed to have been influential in having the Fleet Prison shut down. Karl Marx asserted that Dickens "issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together". George Bernard Shaw even remarked that Great Expectations was more seditious than Marx's Das Kapital. The exceptional popularity of Dickens's novels, even those with socially oppositional themes (Bleak House, 1853; Little Dorrit, 1857; Our Mutual Friend, 1865), not only underscored his ability to create compelling storylines and unforgettable characters, but also ensured that the Victorian public confronted issues of social justice that had commonly been ignored. It has been argued that his technique of flooding his narratives with an 'unruly superfluity of material' that, in the gradual dénouement, yields up an unsuspected order, influenced the organisation of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.
Dickens is often described as using idealised characters and highly sentimental scenes to contrast with his caricatures and the ugly social truths he reveals. The story of Nell Trent in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) was received as extraordinarily moving by contemporary readers but viewed as ludicrously sentimental by Oscar Wilde. "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell", he said in a famous remark, "without dissolving into tears...of laughter." G. K. Chesterton stated, "It is not the death of little Nell, but the life of little Nell, that I object to", arguing that the maudlin effect of his description of her life owed much to the gregarious nature of Dickens's grief, his "despotic" use of people's feelings to move them to tears in works like this.
The question as to whether Dickens belongs to the tradition of the sentimental novel is debatable. Valerie Purton, in her book Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition, sees him continuing aspects of this tradition, and argues that his "sentimental scenes and characters [are] as crucial to the overall power of the novels as his darker or comic figures and scenes", and that "Dombey and Son is [ ... ] Dickens's greatest triumph in the sentimentalist tradition". The Encyclopædia Britannica online comments that, despite "patches of emotional excess", such as the reported death of Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol (1843), "Dickens cannot really be termed a sentimental novelist".
In Oliver Twist Dickens provides readers with an idealised portrait of a boy so inherently and unrealistically good that his values are never subverted by either brutal orphanages or coerced involvement in a gang of young pickpockets. While later novels also centre on idealised characters (Esther Summerson in Bleak House and Amy Dorrit in Little Dorrit), this idealism serves only to highlight Dickens's goal of poignant social commentary. Dickens's fiction, reflecting what he believed to be true of his own life, makes frequent use of coincidence, either for comic effect or to emphasise the idea of providence. For example, Oliver Twist turns out to be the lost nephew of the upper-class family that rescues him from the dangers of the pickpocket group. Such coincidences are a staple of 18th-century picaresque novels, such as Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, which Dickens enjoyed reading as a youth.
Dickens was the most popular novelist of his time, and remains one of the best-known and most-read of English authors. His works have never gone out of print, and have been adapted continually for the screen since the invention of cinema, with at least 200 motion pictures and TV adaptations based on Dickens's works documented. Many of his works were adapted for the stage during his own lifetime, and as early as 1913, a silent film of The Pickwick Papers was made.
Dickens created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest British novelist of the Victorian era. His literary reputation, however began to decline with the publication of Bleak House in 1852–53. Philip Collins calls Bleak House ‘a crucial item in the history of Dickens's reputation. Reviewers and literary figures during the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s, saw a "drear decline" in Dickens, from a writer of "bright sunny comedy ... to dark and serious social" commentary. The Spectator called Bleak House "a heavy book to read through at once ... dull and wearisome as a serial"; Richard Simpson, in The Rambler, characterized Hard Times as ‘this dreary framework’; Fraser's Magazine thought Little Dorrit ‘decidedly the worst of his novels’. All the same, despite these "increasing reservations amongst reviewers and the chattering classes, ‘the public never deserted its favourite’". Dickens's popular reputation remained unchanged, sales continued to rise, and Household Words and later All the Year Round were highly successful.
—Peter Garratt in The Guardian on Dickens’ fame and the demand for his public readings.
Later in his career, Dickens’ fame and the demand for his public readings were unparalleled. In 1868 The Times wrote, "Amid all the variety of 'readings', those of Mr Charles Dickens stand alone.” A Dickens biographer, Edgar Johnson, wrote in the 1950s: "It was [always] more than a reading; it was an extraordinary exhibition of acting that seized upon its auditors with a mesmeric possession." Comparing his reception to a pop star, The Guardian states, “People sometimes fainted at his shows. His performances even saw the rise of that modern phenomenon, the "speculator" or ticket tout – the ones in New York City escaped detection by borrowing respectable-looking hats from the waiters in nearby restaurants.”
For 70 years after his death Dickens received remarkably little serious attention from the literary intelligentsia. Notable exceptions were George Gissing, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study, 1898, G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens, 1911, John Cowper Powys, Visions and Revisions, 1915, and George Bernard Shaw.
Among fellow writers, Dickens there was a range of opinions. Poet laureate, William Wordsworth (1770–1850), thought him a "very talkative, vulgar young person", adding he had not read a line of his work, while novelist George Meredith (1828– 1909), found Dickens "intellectually lacking". In 1888 Leslie Stephen commented in the Dictionary of National Biography that "if literary fame could be safely measured by popularity with the half-educated, Dickens must claim the highest position among English novelists". Anthony Trollope's Autobiography famously declared Thackeray, not Dickens, to be the greatest novelist of the age. However, both Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky were admirers. Dostoyevsky commented: "We understand Dickens in Russia, I am convinced, almost as well as the English, perhaps even with all the nuances. It may well be that we love him no less than his compatriots do. And yet how original is Dickens, and how very English!". French writer Jules Verne called Dickens his favourite writer, writing his novels "stand alone, dwarfing all others by their amazing power and felicity of expression." Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh was inspired by Dickens's novels in several of his paintings like Vincent's Chair and in an 1889 letter to his sister stated that reading Dickens, especially A Christmas Carol, was one of the things that was keeping him from committing suicide. Oscar Wilde generally disparaged his depiction of character, while admiring his gift for caricature. Henry James denied him a premier position, calling him "the greatest of superficial novelists": Dickens failed to endow his characters with psychological depth and the novels, "loose baggy monsters", betrayed a "cavalier organisation". Virginia Woolf had a love-hate relationship with his works, finding his novels "mesmerizing" while reproving him for his sentimentalism and a commonplace style.
Around 1940–41 the attitude of the literary critics began to warm towards Dickens, led by George Orwell, Inside the Whale and Other Essays. March 1940, Edmund Wilson, The Wound and the Bow, 1941, and Humphry House, Dickens and his World. But even in 1948, F. R. Leavis, in The Great Tradition, asserted that “the adult mind doesn't as a rule find in Dickens a challenge to an unusual and sustained seriousness”; Dickens was indeed a great genius, “but the genius was that of a great entertainer,” though he later changed his opinion with Dickens the Novelist (1970) (with Q. D. (Queenie) Leavis): "Our purpose", they wrote, "is to enforce as unanswerably as possible the conviction that Dickens was one of the greatest of creative writers".
In the 1950s, "a substantial reassessment and re-editing of the works began, and critics found his finest artistry and greatest depth to be in the later novels: Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Great Expectations—and (less unanimously) in Hard Times and Our Mutual Friend". Dickens was a favourite author of Roald Dahl’s; the best-selling children’s author would include three of Dickens’ novels among those read by the title character in his 1988 novel Matilda. Screenwriter Jonathan Nolan’s screenplay for The Dark Knight Rises (2012) was inspired by A Tale of Two Cities, with Nolan calling the depiction of Paris in the novel “one of the most harrowing portraits of a relatable, recognisable civilisation that completely folded to pieces”. On 7 February 2012, the 200th anniversary of Dickens's birth, Philip Womack wrote in The Telegraph: "Today there is no escaping Charles Dickens. Not that there has ever been much chance of that before. He has a deep, peculiar hold upon us".
Influence and legacy
Museums and festivals celebrating Dickens's life and works exist in many places with which Dickens was associated. These include the Charles Dickens Museum in London, the historic home where he wrote Oliver Twist, The Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby; and the Charles Dickens Birthplace Museum in Portsmouth, the house in which he was born. The original manuscripts of many of his novels, as well as printers' proofs, first editions, and illustrations from the collection of Dickens's friend John Forster are held at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Dickens's will stipulated that no memorial be erected in his honour; nonetheless, a life-size bronze statue of Dickens entitled Dickens and Little Nell, cast in 1891 by Francis Edwin Elwell, stands in Clark Park in the Spruce Hill neighbourhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Another life-size statue of Dickens is located at Centennial Park, Sydney, Australia. In 1960 a bass relief sculpture of Dickens, notably featuring characters from his books, was commissioned from sculptor Estcourt J Clack to adorn the office building built on the site of his former home at 1 Devonshire Terrace, London. In 2014, a life-size statue was unveiled near his birthplace in Portsmouth on the 202nd anniversary of his birth; this was supported by the author's great-great grandsons, Ian and Gerald Dickens.
A Christmas Carol is most probably his best-known story, with frequent new adaptations. It is also the most-filmed of Dickens's stories, with many versions dating from the early years of cinema. According to the historian Ronald Hutton, the current state of the observance of Christmas is largely the result of a mid-Victorian revival of the holiday spearheaded by A Christmas Carol. Dickens catalysed the emerging Christmas as a family-centred festival of generosity, in contrast to the dwindling community-based and church-centred observations, as new middle-class expectations arose. Its archetypal figures (Scrooge, Tiny Tim, the Christmas ghosts) entered into Western cultural consciousness. A prominent phrase from the tale, "Merry Christmas", was popularised following the appearance of the story. The term Scrooge became a synonym for miser, and his dismissive exclamation 'Bah! Humbug!' likewise gained currency as an idiom. Novelist William Makepeace Thackeray called the book "a national benefit, and to every man and woman who reads it a personal kindness".
Dickens was commemorated on the Series E £10 note issued by the Bank of England that circulated between 1992 and 2003. His portrait appeared on the reverse of the note accompanied by a scene from The Pickwick Papers. The Charles Dickens School is a high school in Broadstairs, Kent. A theme park, Dickens World, standing in part on the site of the former naval dockyard where Dickens's father once worked in the Navy Pay Office, opened in Chatham in 2007. To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens in 2012, the Museum of London held the UK's first major exhibition on the author in 40 years. In 2002, Dickens was number 41 in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. American literary critic Harold Bloom placed Dickens among the greatest Western Writers of all time. In the UK survey The Big Read, carried out by the BBC in 2003, five of Dickens's books were named in the Top 100.
Dickens and his publications have appeared on a number of postage stamps including: UK (1970, 1993, 2011 and 2012), Soviet Union (1962), Antigua, Barbuda, Botswana, Cameroon, Dubai, Fujairah, St Christopher, Nevis and Anguilla, St Helena, St Lucia and Turks and Caicos Islands (1970), St Vincent (1987), Nevis (2007), Alderney, Gibraltar, Jersey and Pitcairn Islands (2012), Austria (2013), Mozambique (2014).
In November 2018 it was reported that a previously lost portrait of a 31-year-old Dickens, by Margaret Gillies, had been found in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Gillies was an early supporter of women's suffrage and had painted the portrait in late 1843 when Dickens, aged 31, wrote A Christmas Carol. It was exhibited, to acclaim, at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1844.
Dickens published well over a dozen major novels and novellas, a large number of short stories, including a number of Christmas-themed stories, a handful of plays, and several non-fiction books. Dickens's novels were initially serialised in weekly and monthly magazines, then reprinted in standard book formats.
- The Pickwick Papers (The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club; monthly serial, April 1836 to November 1837)
- Oliver Twist (The Adventures of Oliver Twist; monthly serial in Bentley's Miscellany, February 1837 to April 1839)
- Nicholas Nickleby (The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby; monthly serial, April 1838 to October 1839)
- The Old Curiosity Shop (weekly serial in Master Humphrey's Clock, April 1840 to November 1841)
- Barnaby Rudge (Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty; weekly serial in Master Humphrey's Clock, February to November 1841)
- A Christmas Carol (A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost-story of Christmas; 1843)
- Martin Chuzzlewit (The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit; monthly serial, January 1843 to July 1844)
- The Chimes (The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In; 1844)
- The Cricket on the Hearth (The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home; 1845)
- Dombey and Son (Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son: Wholesale, Retail and for Exportation; monthly serial, October 1846 to April 1848)
- The Haunted Man (The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain: A Fancy for Christmas-time; 1848)
- David Copperfield (The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery [Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account]; monthly serial, May 1849 to November 1850)
- Bleak House (monthly serial, March 1852 to September 1853)
- Hard Times (Hard Times: For These Times; weekly serial in Household Words, 1 April 1854, to 12 August 1854)
- Little Dorrit (monthly serial, December 1855 to June 1857)
- A Tale of Two Cities (weekly serial in All the Year Round, 30 April 1859, to 26 November 1859)
- Great Expectations (weekly serial in All the Year Round, 1 December 1860 to 3 August 1861)
- Our Mutual Friend (monthly serial, May 1864 to November 1865)
- The Signal-Man (1866), first published as part of the Mugby Junction collection in the 1866 Christmas edition of All the Year Round.
- Edwin Drood (The Mystery of Edwin Drood; monthly serial, April 1870 to September 1870), left unfinished due to Dickens's death
- A contemporary obituary in The Times, alleged that Dickens's last words were: "Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fulfilled all the rules of Art." reprinted from The Times, London, August 1870 in Bidwell 1870, p. 223.
- Slater detects also Ellen Ternan in the portrayal of Lucie Manette.
- Black 2007, p. 735.
- Mazzeno 2008, p. 76.
- Chesterton 2005, pp. 100–126.
- Grossman 2012, p. 54
- Lodge 2002, p. 118.
- "The curious staying power of the cliffhanger". The New Yorker. 2 December 2017.
- Ziegler 2007, pp. 46–47.
- Stone 1987, pp. 267–268.
- Hauser 1999, p. 116.
- "Hearing voices allowed Charles Dickens to create extraordinary fictional worlds". The Guardian. Retrieved 7 September 2019.
- "Oxford Dictionaries – Dickensian". Oxford University Press.
- Callow 2012, p. 9
- West, Gilian (Spring 1999). "Huffam and Son". The Dickensian. Dickens Fellowship. 95 (447): 5–18.
- Callow 2012, p. 5
- Forster 2006, p. 13.
- Callow 2012, p. 7
- Ackroyd 1990, pp. 22–24:29–30.
- Ackroyd 1990, p. 41.
- Schlicke 1999, p. 158.
- Callow 2009, p. 13
- Ackroyd 1990, p. 76:'recklessly improvident'.
- Pope-Hennessy 1945, p. 11.
- Forster 2006, p. 27.
- Ackroyd 1990, p. 76.
- Wilson 1972, p. 53.
- Forster 2006, pp. 23–24.
- Callow 2009, p. 25
- Schlicke 1999, p. 157.
- Wilson 1972, p. 58.
- Cain 2008, p. 91.
- Wilson 1972, p. 61.
- Callow 2009, pp. 34, 36
- Pope-Hennessy 1945, p. 18.
- Wilson 1972, p. 64.
- Davis 1998, p. 23.
- Callow 2009, p. 48
- Tomalin 1992, p. 7
- Tomalin 1992, p. 76
- Patten 2001, pp. 16–18.
- Ackroyd 1990, pp. 174–176.
- Glancy 1999, p. 6.
- Van De Linde 1917, p. 75.
- Callow 2009, p. 54
- Callow 2012, p. 56
- Callow 2012, p. 60
- Ackroyd 1990, pp. 201, 278–279.
- Smiley 2002, pp. 12–14.
- Schlicke 1999, p. 160
- "Notable people connected with St Luke's". St Luke’s and Christ Church. Chelsea. Retrieved 25 February 2019.
- Ackroyd 1990, pp. 162, 181–182.
- Ackroyd 1990, p. 221.
- Callow 2012, p. 74
- Ackroyd 1990, pp. 225–229:p=227.
- Callow 2012, pp. 77, 78
- Callow 2012, p. 97
- "Queen Victoria's Journals". RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W). 26 December 1838. Retrieved 24 May 2013.
- Schlicke 1999, p. 514.
- Callow 2012, p. 98
- Slater 2009, pp. 167–168
- Schlicke, Paul (2011). The Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens: (Anniversary ed.). Oxford University Press. pp. 462–463. ISBN 978-0199640188.
- Miller, Sandra A. (18 March 2012). "When Charles Dickens came to Boston". The Boston Globe. Archived from the original on 14 February 2014. Retrieved 22 January 2019.
- Jones 2004, p. 7
- Smith 2001, pp. 10–11.
- Ackroyd 1990, pp. 225–229
- Moore 2004, pp. 44–45
- "Marlon James and Charles Dickens: Embrace the art, not the racist artist". The Economist. 20 October 2015. Retrieved 21 October 2015.
- Ackroyd 1990, pp. 345–346.
- Tomalin 2011, p. 127.
- Tomalin 2011, pp. 128–132.
- Flint 2001, p. 35.
- "Charles Dickens in Toronto" (PDF). Halcyon: The Newsletter of the Friends of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. University of Toronto. November 1992. Retrieved 13 October 2017.
- Brown, Mark (21 November 2018). "Lost portrait of Charles Dickens turns up at auction in South Africa". The Guardian. Retrieved 22 November 2018.
- Callow 2009, pp. 146–148
- Schlicke 1999, p. 98.
- Moss, Sidney P.; Moss, Carolyn J. (1996). The Charles Dickens-Thomas Powell Vendetta. Troy New York: The Whitston Publishing Company. pp. 42–125.
- Nayder 2011, p. 148.
- Ackroyd 1990, pp. 249; 530–538; 549–550; 575
- Hartley 2009, pp. [pages needed].
- Callow 2012, p. 63
- Dickens, Charles (2013) . "Sunday under Three Heads" (PDF). Electronics Classics Series. Archived from the original (PDF) on 25 September 2014. Retrieved 25 February 2019.
- Simon Callow, 'Charles Dickens'. p.159
- Colledge, Gary (2012). God and Charles Dickens: Recovering the Christian Voice of a Classic Author. Brazos Press. p. 24. ISBN 978-1441247872.
- Rost, Stephen. "The Faith Behind the Famous: Charles Dickens". Christianity Today. Retrieved 20 December 2016.
- Colledge 2009, p. 87.
- Skelton, Stephen. "Reclaiming 'A Christmas Carol'". Christian Broadcasting Network. Retrieved 25 February 2019.
- "The Life Of Our Lord" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 7 November 2012.
- Smith, Karl (2008). Dickens and the Unreal City: Searching for Spiritual Significance in Nineteenth-Century London. Springer. pp. 11–12.
- Allingham, Philip V, ed. (June 2011). "Dickens and Religion: The Life of Our Lord (1846)". Victorian Web.
- Ledger, Sally; Furneaux, Holly, eds. (2011). Charles Dickens in Context. Cambridge University Press. p. 318. ISBN 0521887003.
- Watts, Cedric Thomas (1976). The English novel. Sussex Books. p. 55. ISBN 978-0905272023.
- Roberts, David (1989). "Charles Dickens and the "Daily News": Editorials and Editorial Writers". Victorian Periodicals Review. 22 (2): 51–63. JSTOR 20082378.
- Slater, Michael (2015). Douglas Jerrold. Gerald Duckworth & Co. pp. 197–204. ISBN 978-0715646588.
- Soubigou, Gilles "Dickens's Illustrations: France and other countries" pages 154-167 from The Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe edited by Michael Hollington London: A&C Black 2013 page 159.
- Hiu Yen Lee, Klaudia (2015). Charles Dickens and China, 1895-1915: Cross-Cultural Encounters. Taylor & Francis. p. 56.
- Dickens, Charles. "Preface". David Copperfield (1867 ed.). London: Wordsworth Classics. p. 4.
- Ackroyd 1990, pp. 628; 634–638.
- Ackroyd 1990, pp. 648; 686–687; 772–773
- Ackroyd 1990, pp. 32:723:750.
- Ackroyd 1990, pp. 589–95; 848–852.
- Slater 2009, pp. 389—390
- Cotsell, Michael (1986). "Politics and Peeling Frescoes: Layard of Nineveh and "Little Dorrit"". Dickens Studies Annual. 15: 181–200.
- Slater 2009, pp. 389—390
- Schlicke, Paul (2011). The Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens: Anniversary Edition. Oxford University Press. p. 10.
- Dickens, Charles (1880). The Letters of Charles Dickens, Volume 2. Chapman and Hall. p. 140.
- Ledger, Sally (2011). Charles Dickens in Context. Cambridge University Press. pp. 43–44.
- Ackroyd 1990, pp. 788–799.
- Furneaux 2011, pp. 190–191.
- Page 1999, p. 261.
- Jones 2004, pp. 80–81.
- Ackroyd 1990, pp. 801, 804.
- Page 1999, pp. 260–263 for excerpts from the speech.
- Ackroyd 1990, pp. 809–814.
- Sutherland 1990, p. 185.
- Hobsbaum 1998, p. 270.
- Schlicke, Paul (2011). The Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens: Anniversary Edition. Oxford University Press. p. 302.
- "Charles Dickens novel inscribed to George Eliot up for sale". The Guardian. Retrieved 7 September 2019.
- "A Tale of Two Cities, King's Head, review". The Telegraph. Retrieved 7 September 2019.
- Charles Dickens (1993), Great Expectations, p. 1, introduction. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics
- Tomalin 2011, pp. 332.
- Ackroyd 1990, pp. 881–883.
- Ackroyd 1990, pp. 914–917.
- Nisbet 1952, p. 37.
- Tomalin 1992, pp. 142–143.
- Henson 2004, p. 113.
- Ashley Alexander Mallett, The Black Lords of Summer: The Story of the 1868 Aboriginal Tour of England, pp.65–66.
- Australian Dictionary of Biography. Retrieved 29 October 2013
- University of Sydney Archived 4 June 2011 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 29 October 2013
- Sydney Morning Herald, "Dickens of a time", 24 December 2002. Retrieved 29 October 2013
- Ackroyd 1990, pp. 959–961.
- "The Staplehurst Disaster". Retrieved 28 February 2015.
- "The Staplehurst Disaster". University of California: Santa Cruz. Retrieved 15 November 2012.
- Hobsbaum 1998, p. 271.
- Forster, John (1874). The Life of Charles Dickens: 1852 - 1870, Volume 3. Chapman and Hall. p. 363.
- Wills, Elspeth (2010). The Fleet 1840 - 2010. London: The Open Agency. p. 23. ISBN 9 780954 245184.
- Jackson 1995, p. 333.
- Tomalin 2011, p. 377
- Ackroyd 1990, pp. 1043–1044.
- Foxcroft 2007, p. 53.
- Ackroyd 1990, pp. 1069–1070.
- "Luke Fildes". TheFamousArtists.com.
- Tomalin 2011, pp. 395–396, 484
- Forster 2006, p. 628.
- Hughes 1891, p. 226.
- Ackroyd 1990, pp. 1077–1078.
- Stanley 1870, pp. 144–147:146.
- "John Forster, "The Life of Charles Dickens" (13)". Archived from the original on 25 December 2013.
- Levin 1970, p. 676
- Levin 1970, p. 674
- Purton 2012, p. xvii
- Ackroyd 1990, pp. 44–45.
- Luebering, J E. "Picaresque novel". Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved 5 March 2019.
- Allen, Walter E. "Last Years: Tom Jones". Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved 5 March 2019.
- Watt 1963, p. 300
- Ackroyd 1990, p. 44
- Dickens 1934, p. xviii
- Forster, John (2008) . "Chapter 20". The Life of Charles Dickens. III. Project Gutenberg. p. 462. Retrieved 5 March 2019.
- Mee 2010, p. 20.
- Vlock 1998, p. 30.
- Stone 1987, pp. xx–xxi.
- Cohen 1980, p. 206.
- Jones 2012.
- "Scrooge, Ebenezer - definition of Scrooge, Ebenezer in English". Oxford English Dictionary.
- Ziegler 2007, p. 45.
- Hawes 1998, p. 153.
- Ziegler 2007, p. 46.
- Hawes 1998, p. 158.
- Hawes 1998, p. 109.
- Woolf 1986, p. 286.
- "The best Charles Dickens characters". The Telegraph. Retrieved 7 September 2019.
- Jones, Bryony (13 February 2012). "A tale of one city: Dickensian London". CNN. Retrieved 21 August 2014.
- Wolfreys, Julian (2012). Dickens's London: Perception, Subjectivity and Phenomenal Urban Multiplicity. Edinburgh University Press. p. 209. ISBN 978-0-7486-4040-9.
- Polloczek 1999, p. 133.
- Ackroyd 1990.
- Slater 1983, pp. 43, 47
- Ackroyd 1990, p. 653.
- Glancy 1999, p. 34.
- Davies 1983, pp. 166–169.
- Stevenson, Robert Louis (1895). The Novels and Tales of Robert Louis Stevenson: The Wrecker. Scribner’s. p. 245.
- Ackroyd 1990, p. 345.
- Raina 1986, p. 25.
- Bodenheimer 2011, p. 147.
- Kucich & Sadoff 2006, p. 155.
- Atkinson 1990, p. 48, citing Gillian Beer's Darwin's Plots (1983, p.8).
- Boev, Hristo. "Deconstructing Little Nell". The Victorian Web.
- Ellmann 1988, p. 441: In conversation with Ada Leverson.
- Chesterton 1911, pp. 54–55.
- Purton, Valerie (2012). Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition: Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Lamb. Anthem nineteenth century studies. London: Anthem Press. pp. xiii, 123. ISBN 978-0857284181.
- "novel (literature)". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 7 July 2013.
- Marlow 1994, pp. 149–150.
- Ackroyd 1990, p. 44.
- Trollope 2007, p. 62.
- Swift 2007
- Sasaki 2011, p. 67.
- Morrison 2012.
- Flom, Eric L. (5 March 2009). Silent Film Stars on the Stages of Seattle: A History of Performances by Hollywood Notables. McFarland. p. 119. ISBN 9780786439089.
- Adam Roerts, "Dickens Reputation",Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens, ed. Paul Schlicke, Oxford University Press Print Publication Date: 2000 Print ISBN 9780198662532 Published online: 2011 (subscription required) e ISBN 9780191727986, p. 504.
- Adam Roerts, "Dickens Reputation", p. 505.
- Shinn, Matt (31 January 2004). "Stage frights". The Guardian. Retrieved 12 September 2019.
- "Archibald Henderson, "Bernard Shaw's Novels: And Why They Failed". Dalhousie Review, Volume 34, Number 4, 1955, p. 373" (PDF).
- Philip Collins, "Dickens reputation". Britannica Academica.
- Neil Roberts, Meredith and the Novel. Springer, 1997, p. 49.
- Dictionary of National Biography Macmillan, 1888, p. 30.
- Jahn, Gary R. (4 July 1999). "Tolstoy's the Death of Ivan Ilʹich: A Critical Companion". Northwestern University Press – via Google Books.
- Friedberg, Maurice (1997). Literary Translation in Russia: A Cultural History. Penn State Press. p. 12.
- Soubigou, Gilles "Dickens's Illustrations: France and other countries" pages 154-167 from The Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe edited by Michael Hollington London: A&C Black 2013 page 161.
- Soubigou, Gilles "Dickens's Illustrations: France and other countries" pages 154-167 from The Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe edited by Michael Hollington London: A&C Black 2013 pages 164-165.
- Ellmann 1988, pp. 25,359.
- Kucich & Sadoff 2006, p. 162.
- Mazzeno 2008, pp. 23–4.
- Mazzeno 2008, p. 67.
- Philip Collins, "Dickens reputation". Britannica Academica
- Oxford Reference, subscription required
- ""Dickens", Faber & Faber".[permanent dead link]
- Britannica Academica, subscription required.
- Rosen, Michael (2012). Fantastic Mr Dahl. Penguin UK.
- "Christopher and Jonathan Nolan Explain How A Tale Of Two Cities Influenced The Dark Knight Rises". Collider. Retrieved 9 September 2019.
- "Why Charles Dickens speaks to us now".. The Telegraph. Retrieved 31 May 2019
- Jones 2004, p. 104.
- "Down Under with Dickens". Sydney Morning Herald". Retrieved 18 February 2014
- Hawes, Donald. (1998). Who's who in Dickens. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-13604-0. OCLC 36663056.
- "Charles Dickens relief". London Remembers. Retrieved 8 January 2020.
- Kennedy, Maev (6 February 2014). "Portsmouth erects Britain's first full-size statue of Charles Dickens". The Guardian. Retrieved 26 February 2014.
- "Charles Dickens statue unveiled in Portsmouth". BBC. Retrieved 14 February 2014.
- Callow 2009, p. 39
- Hutton 2001, p. 188.
- Cochrane 1996, p. 126.
- Robinson 2005, p. 316.
- Werner 2011.
- "BBC – Great Britons – Top 100". Internet Archive. Archived from the original on 4 December 2002. Retrieved 20 April 2013.
- Bloom, Harold (1994). The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace. p. 226. ISBN 0-15-195747-9.
- The Big Read: Top 100 Books BBC Retrieved 2 April 2011
- Mrva-Montoya, Agata (August 2011). "On Dickens and postage stamps". University of Sydney. Archived from the original on 26 February 2019. Retrieved 25 February 2019.
- Johnson 1969 for the serial publication dates.
- Ackroyd, Peter (1990). Dickens. London: Sinclar-Stevenson. ISBN 978-1-85619-000-8.
- Atkinson, Paul (1990). The Ethnographic Imagination: Textual Constructions of Reality. London: Routledge. p. 48. ISBN 978-0-415-01761-9.
- Bidwell, Walter Hilliard, ed. (July–December 1870). "The Eclectic Magazine: Foreign Literature". Eclectic Magazine: Foreign Literature, Science and Art. New Series (Charles Dickens Obituary). 12: 222–224.
- Black, Joseph Laurence (2007). "Charles Dickens". In Black, Joseph Laurence (ed.). The age of romanticism. The Victorian era. The twentieth century and beyond. The Broadview Anthology of British Literature. 2. Broadview Press. pp. 735–743. ISBN 978-1-55111-869-7.
- Bodenheimer, Rosemarie (2011). "London in the Victorian Novel". In Manley, Lawrence (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of London. Cambridge University Press. pp. 142–159. ISBN 978-0-521-72231-5.
- Cain, Lynn (2008). Dickens, family, authorship: psychoanalytic perspectives on kinship and creativity. Ashgate Publishing. ISBN 978-0-7546-6180-1.
- Callow, Simon (2012). Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World. Vintage. ISBN 978-0-345-80323-8.
- Callow, Simon (2009). Dickens's Christmas: A Victorian Celebration. Frances Lincoln Ltd. ISBN 978-0-7112-3031-6.
- Chesterton, G K (2005) . Charles Dickens: A Critical Study. Kessinger Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4179-1996-3.
- Chesterton, G K (1911). Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens. J M DentForgotten Books. p. 54. ISBN 978-1-4400-9125-4.
- Cochrane, Robertson (1996). Wordplay: origins, meanings, and usage of the English language. University of Toronto Press. ISBN 978-0-8020-7752-3.
- Cohen, Jane R. (1980). Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Ohio State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8142-0284-5.
- Colledge, Gary L (2009). God and Charles Dickens. Baker Books. ISBN 978-1-4412-3778-1.
- Davis, Paul (1998). Charles Dickens A to Z. Facts on File, Inc. ISBN 978-0-8160-2905-1.
- Hartley, Jenny (2009). Charles Dickens and The House of Fallen Women. London: Methuen. ISBN 978-0-413-77643-3.
- Morrison, Richard (3 February 2012). "Champion of the little people". The Australian. Retrieved 22 April 2012.
- Davies, James A (1983). John Forster, a Literary Life. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-0-389-20391-9.
- Ellmann, Richard (1988) . Oscar Wilde. London: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-009661-3.
- Flint, Kate (2001). "The middle novels: Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Copperfield". In Jordan, John O (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-66964-1.
- Forster, John (2006) [1872–1874]. Life of Charles Dickens. London: Diderot Publishing. ISBN 978-90-77932-03-2.
- Foxcroft, Louise (2007). The Making of Addiction: The 'Use and Abuse' of Opium in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Ashgate Publishing. ISBN 978-0-7546-5633-3.
- Furneaux, Holly (2011). "Childhood". In Ledger, Sally; Furneaux, Holly (eds.). Dickens in Context. Cambridge University Press. pp. 186–193. ISBN 978-0-521-88700-7.
- Glancy, Ruth (1999). Student Companion to Charles Dickens. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Company. ISBN 978-0-313-30611-2.
- Grossman, Jonathan H (2012). Charles Dickens's Networks: Public Transport and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-964419-3.
- Hauser, Arnold (1999) . The Social History of Art: Naturalism, impressionism, the film age. The Social History of Art. 4. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-19948-3.
- Hawes, Donald (1998). Who's Who in Dickens. Psychology Press. ISBN 978-0-415-13604-4.
- Henson, Louise (2004). "'In the Natural Course of Physical Things': Ghosts and Science in Charles Dickens's All the Year Round". In Henson, Louise; Cantor, Geoffrey; Dawson, Gowan; Noakes, Richard; Shuttleworth, Sally; Topham, Jonathan R (eds.). Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media. Ashgate Publishing. pp. 113–124. ISBN 978-0-7546-3574-1.
- Hobsbaum, Philip (1998) . A reader's guide to Charles Dickens. Syracuse University Press. p. 270. ISBN 978-0-8156-0475-4.
- Hughes, William Richard (1891). A week's tramp in Dickens-Land: together with personal reminiscences of the 'Inimitable Boz'. Oxford: Chapman & Hall.
- Hutton, Ronald (2001). The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-285448-3.
- Jackson, Kenneth T (1995). The Encyclopedia of New York City. New York Historical Society. ISBN 978-0-300-05536-8.
- Johnson, E D H (1969). Charles Dickens: An Introduction to His Novels. Random House Studies in Language and Literature. Random House. ASIN B0011BLL8W. Retrieved 22 April 2012.
- Jones, Richard (2004). Walking Dickensian London. Globetrotter walking guides. London: New Holland Publishers. ISBN 978-1-84330-483-8.
- Jones, Sam (6 February 2012). "Ebenezer Scrooge named most popular Dickens character". The Guardian. Retrieved 22 April 2012.
- Joshi, Prithi (2011). "Race". In Ledger, Sally; Furneaux, Holly (eds.). Dickens in Context. Cambridge University Press. pp. 292–300. ISBN 978-0-521-88700-7.
- Kucich, John; Sadoff, Dianne F (2006). "Charles Dickens". In Kastan, David Scott (ed.). The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, Volume. 1. Oxford University Press. pp. 154–164. ISBN 978-0-19-516921-8.
- Lodge, David (2002). Consciousness and the Novel. Harvard, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. p. 118. ISBN 978-0-674-00949-3.
- Mackenzie, Robery Shelton (1870). Life of Charles Dickens. by R. Shelton Mackenzie. With Personal Recollections and Anecdotes;--Letters by 'Boz', Never Before Published;--And ... Prose and Verse. With Portrait and Autograph. Philadelphia: T B Peterson & Brothers. ISBN 978-1-4255-5680-8. Retrieved 10 June 2012.
- Marlow, James E (1994). Charles Dickens: The Uses of Time. Susquehanna University Press. ISBN 978-0-945636-48-9.
- Mazzeno, Laurence W (2008). The Dickens industry: critical perspectives 1836–2005. Studies in European and American literature and culture. Literary criticism in perspective. Camden House. ISBN 978-1-57113-317-5.
- Mee, Jon (2010). The Cambridge Introduction to Charles Dickens. Cambridge Introductions to Literature. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-67634-2.
- Moore, Grace (2004). Dickens and Empire:Discourses of Class, Race and Colonialism in the Works of Charles Dickens. Ashgate Publishing. ISBN 978-0-7546-3412-6.
- Nayder, Lillian (2011). The other Dickens: a life of Catherine Hogarth. Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-4787-7.
- Nisbet, Ada (1952). Dickens & Ellen Ternan. University of California Press. p. 37.
- Page, Norman (1999). Charles Dickens:Family History. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-22233-4.
- Patten, Robert L (2001). "From Sketches to Nickleby". In Jordan, John O (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-66964-1.
- Polloczek, Dieter (1999). "Aporias of Retribution and questions of responsibility: the legacy of incarceration in Dickens's Bleak House". Literature and Legal Discourse: Equity and Ethics from Sterne to Conrad. Cambridge University Press. pp. 124–201. ISBN 978-0-521-65251-3.
- Pope-Hennessy, Una (1945). Charles Dickens 1812–1870. Chatto and Windus.
- Raina, Badri (1986). Dickens and the Dialectic of Growth. University of Wisconsin Press. p. 25. ISBN 978-0-299-10610-2.
- Robinson, David J. (2005). Disordered personalities (3 ed.). Rapid Psychler Press. ISBN 978-1-894328-09-8.
- Sasaki, Toru (2011). "Modern screen adaptations". In Ledger, Sally; Furneaux, Holly (eds.). Dickens in Context. Cambridge University Press. pp. 67–73. ISBN 978-0-521-88700-7.
- Schlicke, Paul, ed. (1999). Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-866213-6.
- Slater, Michael (1983). Dickens and Women. Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-1180-7.
- Slater, Michael (2009). Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing. New Haven, London: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-11207-8.
- Smiley, Jane (2002). Charles Dickens. New York: Penguin. ISBN 978-0-670-03077-4.
- Smith, Grahame (2001). "The Life and Times of Charles Dickens". In Jordan, John O (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-66964-1.
- Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn (1870). "Dean Stanley on Charles Dickens". Speeches, letters, and sayings of Charles Dickens. Harper.
- Stone, Harry (1987). Dickens's working notes for his novels. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-14590-7.
- Sutherland, John (1990). The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-1842-4.
- Swift, Simon (18 April 2007). "What the Dickens?". The Guardian. Retrieved 21 April 2012.
- Tomalin, Claire (2011). Charles Dickens: A Life. Viking. ISBN 978-0-670-91767-9.
- Tomalin, Claire (1992). The invisible woman: the story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens. Vintage Books. ISBN 978-0-679-73819-0.
- Trollope, Anthony (2007). Bloom, Harold (ed.). Charles Dickens. Bloom's Classic Critical Views. Infobase Publishing. ISBN 978-0-7910-9558-4.
- Van De Linde, Gérard (1917). Reminiscences. Ayer Publishing. ISBN 978-0-405-10917-1.
- Vlock, Deborah (1998). Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre. Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. 19. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-64084-8.
- Werner, Alex (9 December 2011). "Exhibition in focus: Dickens and London, the Museum of London". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 22 April 2012.
- Wilson, Angus (1972). The World of Charles Dickens. Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-670-02026-3.
- Woolf, Virginia (1986). McNeillie, Andrew (ed.). The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1925–1928 (2 ed.). Hogarth Press. ISBN 978-0-7012-0669-7.
- Ziegler, Alan (2007). The Writing Workshop Note Book: Notes on Creating and Workshopping. Counterpoint Press. ISBN 978-1-933368-70-2.
- Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900. .
- Bowen, John (2003). Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit (2 ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-926140-6.
- Bradbury, Nicola, Charles Dickens' Great Expectations (St. Martin's Press, 1990) ISBN 978-0312056582
- Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert, "Becoming Dickens 'The Invention of a Novelist'", London: Harvard University Press, 2011
- Gold, David L (2009). González, Félix Rodríquez; Buades, Antonio Lillo (eds.). Studies in Etymology and Etiology: With Emphasis on Germanic, Jewish, Romance and Slavic Languages. Universidad de Alicante. ISBN 978-84-7908-517-9.
- Hart, Christopher (20 May 2007). "What, the Dickens World?". The Sunday Times. UK. Archived from the original on 5 July 2008. Retrieved 21 April 2012.
- Heller, Deborah (1990). "The Outcast as Villain and Victim: Jews in Dickens Oliver Twist and Our Mutual Friend". In Cohen, Derek; Heller, Deborah (eds.). Jewish Presences in English Literature. McGill-Queen's Press. pp. 40–60. ISBN 978-0-7735-0781-4.
- Jarvie, Paul A (2005). Ready to Trample on All Human Law: Finance Capitalism in the Fiction of Charles Dickens. Studies in Major Literary Authors. New York, NY: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-97524-7.
- Johnson, Edgar, Charles Dickens: his tragedy and triumph, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952. In two volumes.
- Joshi, Prithi (2011). "Race". In Ledger, Sally; Furneaux, Holly (eds.). Dickens in Context. Cambridge University Press. pp. 292–300. ISBN 978-0-521-88700-7.
- Kaplan, Fred (1988). Dickens: A Biography. William Morrow & Company. ISBN 978-0-688-04341-4.
- Levine, Gary Martin (2003). The merchant of modernism: the economic Jew in Anglo-American Literature, 1864–1939. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-94109-9.
- Manning, Mick & Granström, Brita, Charles Dickens: Scenes From An Extraordinary Life, Frances Lincoln Children's Books, 2011.
- Mendelsohn, Ezra (1996). Literary Strategies: Jewish Texts and Contexts. Studies in Contemporary Jewry. 12. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-511203-0.
- Meckier, Jerome (2002). Dickens's Great Expectations: Misnar's Pavilion Versus Cinderella. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 978-0-813-12228-1.
- Moore, Grace (2002). "Reappraising Dickens's 'Noble Savage'". The Dickensian. 98 (458): 236–243.
- Nayder, Lillian (2002). Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian Authorship. Cornell University Press. p. 96. ISBN 978-0-8014-3925-4.
- Dickens, Charles (1978). "Introduction". In Patten, Robert L. (ed.). The Pickwick Papers. Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-415-22233-4.
- Pointer, Michael (1996). Charles Dickens on the screen: the film, television, and video adaptations. Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-0-8108-2960-2.
- Pope-Hennessy, Una (2007). Charles Dickens. Hennessy Press. ISBN 978-1-4067-5783-5.
- Slater, Michae (2011) . "Dickens, Charles John Huffam". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/7599. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
- Waller, John O. (July 1960). "Charles Dickens and the American Civil War". Studies in Philology. 57 (3): 535–548. JSTOR 4173318.
- Waller, Philip J (2006). Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain, 1870–1918. Oxford University Press. p. 194. ISBN 978-0-19-820677-4.
|Library resources about |
|By Charles Dickens|
- Works by Charles Dickens at Project Gutenberg
- Works by Charles Dickens at Faded Page (Canada)
- Works by or about Charles Dickens at Internet Archive
- Works by Charles Dickens at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- Charles Dickens collection at One More Library
- Journalism at Dickens Journals Online, an online edition of Household Words and All the Year Round
- Online books, and library resources in your library and in other libraries by Charles Dickens
- Charles Dickens at the British Library
Organisations and portals
- "Archival material relating to Charles Dickens". UK National Archives.
- Portraits of Charles Dickens at the National Portrait Gallery, London
- Charles Dickens on the Archives Hub
- The Dickens Fellowship, an international society dedicated to the study of Dickens and his Writings
- Correspondence of Charles Dickens, with related papers, ca. 1834–1955
- Dickens Museum Situated in a former Dickens House, 48 Doughty Street, London, WC1
- Dickens Birthplace Museum Old Commercial Road, Portsmouth
- Victoria and Albert Museum The V&A's collections relating to Dickens
- Charles Dickens at the Encyclopædia Britannica
- Dickens on In Our Time at the BBC
- Charles Dickens's Traveling Kit From the John Davis Batchelder Collection at the Library of Congress
- Charles Dickens's Walking Stick From the John Davis Batchelder Collection at the Library of Congress
- Charles Dickens Collection: First editions of Charles Dickens's works included in the Leonard Kebler gift, (dispersed in the Division's collection). From the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress
- Archival material at Leeds University Library
- Plaques Historical plaques about Charles Dickens, on Open Plaques website
- Charles Dickens on IMDb
| Editor of the Daily News