Charles Dickens

Life

Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth in February 1812, the second of eight children of a clerk in the Navy Pay Office. The family moved to London and lived beyond its means. In 1824 his father was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea, and the twelve-year-old Dickens was sent to work in a boot-blacking warehouse, an episode he kept secret for most of his life and that left a lasting mark on his fiction. He returned to school briefly, then worked as a law clerk and taught himself shorthand to become a parliamentary and newspaper reporter.

His sketches of London life, collected as Sketches by Boz in 1836, led to a commission for The Pickwick Papers, which was published in monthly parts and became a popular sensation. From then on Dickens produced novels almost continuously, most of them in serial form: Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend, among others. He also founded and edited two weekly magazines, Household Words and All the Year Round.

Dickens married Catherine Hogarth in 1836 and had ten children with her; they separated in 1858. He campaigned on social questions, toured the United States twice, and in his last decade gave exhausting public readings from his work. He died at his home in Kent in June 1870, leaving The Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Literary significance

Dickens was the most popular English novelist of the nineteenth century and remains among the most widely read. His books combine broad comedy, melodrama, and social criticism, and they are populated by characters so sharply drawn that many of their names have entered the language. He wrote about poverty, the law, education, and bureaucracy with an anger that helped shape public opinion, and his handling of serial publication, with its cliffhangers and large casts, influenced how fiction was written and sold for the rest of the century.

Where to start

A Tale of Two Cities is the shortest and most tightly plotted of the novels in our catalog and a good first Dickens for readers who want story over sprawl. Great Expectations, told in the first person, is the better book and the usual recommendation for a second.