Charles Dickens

Who Was Charles Dickens?

Charles Dickens was the most popular novelist of the Victorian era and the writer who more than any other shaped the modern English-speaking world’s understanding of social justice, childhood, and Christmas. Born in Portsmouth in 1812, the son of a government clerk whose financial improvidence landed the family in debtor’s prison when Dickens was twelve, he spent several months working in a blacking factory while his father was imprisoned — an experience of humiliation and abandonment that scarred him for life and fueled the extraordinary sympathy for the poor and the suffering that animates his fiction.

He taught himself shorthand, became a parliamentary reporter, and began publishing fiction in 1833. His first novel, The Pickwick Papers (1836–1837), made him famous overnight, and he sustained that fame for the rest of his life through a series of novels published in monthly or weekly installments that reached the widest reading public in the history of English literature.

His major works — Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities — remain among the most widely read novels in the language. His Christianity was unorthodox but genuine: he compiled a version of the New Testament for his children and was moved throughout his career by the figure of Christ as the supreme embodiment of compassion for the suffering.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Oliver Twist — 1837–1839
• A Christmas Carol — 1843
• David Copperfield — 1849–1850
• Bleak House — 1852–1853
• A Tale of Two Cities — 1859
• Great Expectations — 1860–1861