How many novels did Charles Dickens write?
Charles Dickens
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.
Charles Dickens
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.
Dickie Dick Dickens
Rolf and Alexandra Becker wrote five novels parallel with the radio play productions; the first one was published in 1959. The books have been translated into Swedish, and later also into Norwegian and sold in Norway; the first was published in 2012.
A Christmas Carol
By mid-1843 Dickens began to suffer from financial problems. Sales of "Martin Chuzzlewit" were falling off, and his wife, Catherine, was pregnant with their fifth child. Matters worsened when Chapman & Hall, his publishers, threatened to reduce his monthly income by £50 if sales dropped further. He began "A Christmas Carol" in October 1843. Michael Slater, Dickens's biographer, describes the book as being "written at white heat"; it was completed in six weeks, the final pages being written in early December. He built much of the work in his head while taking night-time walks of around London. Dickens's sister-in-law wrote how he "wept, and laughed, and wept again, and excited himself in a most extraordinary manner, in composition". Slater says that "A Christmas Carol" was
East End Literature
Among the first and most prominent authors to depict the East End in fiction was Charles Dickens (1812–70). His godfather had a sail making business in Limehouse, and he based the "Six Jolly Fellowship Porters" in "Our Mutual Friend" (1864–65) on a public house still standing there. The Red Bull, a now demolished inn situated in Whitechapel, features in his "Pickwick Papers". On leaving it Sam Weller makes the sage remark that Whitechapel is "not a wery nice neighbourhood". Fagin in Dickens's "Oliver Twist" appears to be based on a notorious 'fence' named Ikey Solomon (1785–1850) who operated in 1820's Whitechapel. Dickens was also a frequent visitor to the East End theatres and music halls of Hoxton, Shoreditch and Whitechapel, writing of his visits in his journals and his journalism. A visit he made to an opium den in Bluegate Fields inspired certain scenes in his last, unfinished, novel "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" (1870).
David Copperfield
David Copperfield is the eighth novel by Charles Dickens. The novel's full title is The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account). It was first published as a serial in 1849–50, and as a book in 1850.
Charles Dickens
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.
Nicholas Nickleby
An early theatrical version actually appeared before publication of the serialised novel was finished, with the resolution of the stage play wildly different from the finished novel. Dickens' offence at this plagiarism prompted him to have Nicholas encounter a "literary gentleman" in chapter forty-eight of the novel. The gentleman brags that he has dramatised two hundred and forty-seven novels "as fast as they had come out – in some cases faster than they had come out", and claims to have thus bestowed fame on their authors. In response Nicholas delivers a lengthy and heated condemnation of the practice of adapting still-unfinished books without the author's permission, going so far as to say:
A Christmas Carol (disambiguation)
A Christmas Carol is an 1843 novella by Charles Dickens.
List of Assassin's Creed characters
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. As Darwin, he also met Jacob and Evie Frye, and asked their help in "Assassin's Creed Syndicate".
History of modern literature
In 1870 Charles Dickens died aged 58. Before his death he was working on "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" (published unfinished). John McCrae was born. Hilaire Belloc was born (27 July).
Charles Dickens
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".
Charles Dickens Jr.
Charles Culliford Boz Dickens (6 January 1837 – 20 July 1896) was the first child of the English novelist Charles Dickens and his wife Catherine. A failed businessman, he became the editor of his father's magazine "All the Year Round", and a successful writer of dictionaries. He is now most remembered for his two 1879 books "Dickens's Dictionary of London" and "Dickens's Dictionary of the Thames".
A Christmas Carol
By 1849 Dickens was engaged with "David Copperfield" and had neither the time nor the inclination to produce another Christmas book. He decided the best way to reach his audience with his "Carol philosophy" was by public readings. During Christmas 1852 Dickens gave a reading in Birmingham Town Hall to the Industrial and Literary Institute; the performance was a great success. Thereafter, he read the tale in an abbreviated version 127 times, until 1870 (the year of his death), including at his farewell performance.
In the years following the book's publication, responses to the tale were published by W. M. Swepstone ("Christmas Shadows", 1850), Horatio Alger ("Job Warner's Christmas", 1863), Louisa May Alcott ("A Christmas Dream, and How It Came True", 1882), and others who followed Scrooge's life as a reformed man – or some who thought Dickens had got it wrong and needed to be corrected.
Amerika (novel)
Kafka, at the time, was also reading, or rereading, several novels by Charles Dickens and made the following remarks in his diary: "My intention was, as I now see, to write a Dickens novel, enriched by the sharper lights which I took from our modern times, and by the pallid ones I would have found in my own interior."
Charles C. P. Arndt
In 1842, British author Charles Dickens wrote about the tragedy in his book "American Notes".
Eric Jerome Dickey
Author of over 30 novels, novellas, and short stories. All but the first two made the New York Times list, as well as many local lists such as The Washington Post and The LA Times. Also has written a shorter eBook, contributed to 7 anthologies, written an original screenplay (Cappuccino), and a graphic novel for Marvel Entertainment (Storm, part of the X-Men series).
Bleak House
Like most Dickens novels, "Bleak House" was published in 20 monthly instalments, each containing 32 pages of text and two illustrations by Phiz (the last two being published together as a double issue). Each cost one shilling, except for the final double issue, which cost two shillings.
Charles Dickens, "Bleak House", ed. Nicola Bradbury (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996)
A Child's History of England
A Child's History of England is a book by Charles Dickens. It first appeared in serial form in "Household Words", running from 25 January 1851 to 10 December 1853. Dickens also published the work in book form in three volumes: the first volume on 20 December 1851, the second on 25 December 1852 and the third on 24 December 1853. Although the volumes were published in December, each was postdated the following year. They bore the titles:Dickens dedicated the book to "My own dear children, whom I hope it may help, bye and bye, to read with interest larger and better books on the same subject". The history covered the period between 50 BC and 1689, ending with a chapter summarising events from then until the accession of Queen Victoria.
A Christmas Carol
Dickens wrote "A Christmas Carol" during a period when the British were exploring and re-evaluating past Christmas traditions, including carols and newer customs such as Christmas trees. He was influenced by the experiences of his own youth and by the Christmas stories of other authors including Washington Irving and Douglas Jerrold. Dickens had written three Christmas stories prior to the novella, and was inspired following a visit to the Field Lane Ragged School, one of several establishments for London's street children. The treatment of the poor and the ability of a selfish man to redeem himself by transforming into a more sympathetic character are the key themes of the story. There is discussion among academics as to whether this was a fully secular story, or if it is a Christian allegory.
Charles Dickens
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, 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.
John Dickens
John Dickens (21 August 1785 – 31 March 1851) was the father of English novelist Charles Dickens and was the model for Mr Micawber in his son's semi-autobiographical novel "David Copperfield".
English literature
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) emerged on the literary scene in the late 1830s and soon became probably the most famous novelist in the history of English literature. Dickens fiercely satirised various aspects of society, including the workhouse in "Oliver Twist", the failures of the legal system in "Bleak House", An early rival to Dickens was William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863), who during the Victorian period ranked second only to him, but he is now known almost exclusively for "Vanity Fair" (1847). The Brontë sisters, Emily, Charlotte and Anne, were other significant novelists in the 1840s and 1850s. "Jane Eyre" (1847), Charlotte Brontë's most famous work, was the first of the sisters' novels to achieve success. Emily Brontë's (1818–1848) novel was "Wuthering Heights" and, according to Juliet Gardiner, "the vivid sexual passion and power of its language and imagery impressed, bewildered and appalled reviewers," and led the Victorian public and many early reviewers to think that it had been written by a man. "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" (1848) by Anne Brontë is now considered to be one of the first feminist novels.
North and South (Gaskell novel)
"North and South" originally appeared in 20 weekly episodes from September 1854 to January 1855 in "Household Words", edited by Charles Dickens. During this period Dickens dealt with the same theme in Hard Times (also a social novel), which was published in the same magazine from April to August 1854.
The Chimes (disambiguation)
The Chimes is a short 1844 novel by Charles Dickens.
Philip K. Dick
Dick's writing produced 44 published novels and approximately 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime.
Dombey and Son
Dombey and Son is a novel by Charles Dickens, published in monthly parts from 1 October 1846 to 1 April 1848 and in one volume in 1848. Its full title is Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son: Wholesale, Retail and for Exportation. Dickens started writing the book in Lausanne, Switzerland, before returning to England, via Paris, to complete it. Illustrations were provided by Hablot Knight Browne ('Phiz').
Peter Dickinson
Dickinson published almost fifty books, which fall into three general categories: crime fiction for adults (including the James Pibble series), speculative and supernatural fiction for older children, and simpler children's books. One of his few other books was the collection "Chance, Luck and Destiny" (1975), which he calls "prose and verse, fact and fiction, on the themes of the title". It won the second annual Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for children's nonfiction in 1977.
Drood (novel)
Drood is a novel written by Dan Simmons. The book was initially published on February 1, 2009 by Little, Brown and Company. It is a fictionalized account of the last five years of Charles Dickens' life.
Charles Dickinson (FRS)
Frances Dickinson (1820–1898) married John Edward Geils, gave birth to four daughters, and then divorced, resuming the use of her maiden name. Her second husband was Gilbert Ellliot, Dean of Bristol. She was an author and journalist and became a friend of Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens.
Charles Dickens
Dickens's serialisation of his novels was not uncriticised 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."
Bleak House
Bleak House is a novel by English author Charles Dickens, first published as a serial of 20 episodes between March 1852 and September 1853. The novel has many characters and several sub-plots, and the story is told partly by the novel's heroine, Esther Summerson, and partly by an omniscient narrator. At the centre of "Bleak House" is a long-running legal case in the Court of Chancery, "Jarndyce and Jarndyce", which came about because a testator wrote several conflicting wills. In a preface to the 1853 first edition, Dickens claimed there were many actual precedents for his fictional case. One such was probably the Thellusson v Woodford case in which a will read in 1797 was contested and not determined until 1859. Though the legal profession criticised Dickens's satire as exaggerated, this novel helped support a judicial reform movement which culminated in the enactment of legal reform in the 1870s.
Nicholas Nickleby
"Nicholas Nickleby" is Charles Dickens's third published novel. He returned to his favourite publishers and to the format that was considered so successful with "The Pickwick Papers". The story first appeared in monthly parts, after which it was issued in one volume. The style is considered to be episodic and humorous, though the second half of the novel becomes more serious and tightly plotted. Dickens began writing "Nickleby" while still working on "Oliver Twist" and while the mood is considerably lighter, his depiction of the Yorkshire school run by Wackford Squeers is as moving and influential as those of the workhouse and criminal underclass in "Twist".
Nick Morgan
Morgan is also the author of a book on Charles Dickens, a screenplay, and five theatrical plays.
Edward Dickens
Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens (13 March 1852 – 23 January 1902) was the youngest son of English novelist Charles Dickens and his wife Catherine. He immigrated to Australia at the age of 16, and eventually entered politics, serving as a member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly from 1889 to 1894. He died in poverty at the age of 49.
Mary Angela Dickens
Born at 46 Gloucester Road in London, and named after her aunt, Mary Dickens, Mary Angela Dickens was the eldest of eight children of Charles Dickens, Jr. and his wife Elisabeth Matilda Moule Dickens (née Evans) and the granddaughter of Charles Dickens, the famous novelist. She was the niece of the noted barrister and judge, Sir Henry Fielding Dickens, and the painter Kate Perugini. She was christened on 19 December 1862 at St Mark's church in St Pancras in London.
All the Year Round
It hosted the serialisation of many prominent novels, including Dickens' own "A Tale of Two Cities". After Dickens's death in 1870, it was owned and edited by his eldest son Charles Dickens, Jr., with a quarter-share being owned by the editor and journalist William Henry Wills.
Charles Dickens
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."
Dickens' Women
The play includes 23 different characters (male and female) based on or inspired by characters in Charles Dickens' novels.
Charles Dickens
Dickens was regarded as the literary colossus of his age. His 1843 novella, "A Christmas Carol", remains 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. Dickens has been praised by 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. On the other hand, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf complained of a lack of psychological depth, loose writing, and a vein of saccharine 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.
Mary Angela Dickens
Mary Angela Dickens (31 October 1862 – 7 February 1948) was an English novelist and journalist of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, and the oldest grandchild of the novelist Charles Dickens. She died on the 136th anniversary of her grandfather's birth.
Francis Dickens
Francis Jeffrey Dickens (15 January 1844 – 11 June 1886) was the third son and fifth child of Victorian English novelist Charles Dickens and his wife Catherine Dickens née Hogarth.
Charles Dickens
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.
Major works soon followed, including "A Tale of Two Cities" (1859) and "Great Expectations" (1861), which were resounding successes. During this time he was also the publisher, editor, and a major contributor to the journals "Household Words" (1850–1859) and "All the Year Round" (1858–1870).
Elizabeth Dickens
By 1812 her husband had fallen heavily into debt and Elizabeth, like Mrs Micawber in "David Copperfield", tried to help his financial situation by setting up a school called 'Mrs Dickens's Establishment' in Gower Street in London; this despite the fact that she had no experience in teaching or administering a school. Unsurprisingly, no pupils materialised. As Charles Dickens later wrote, "Nobody ever came to the school, nor do I recollect that anybody ever proposed to come, or that the least preparation was made to receive anybody." To help support the family financially the 12-year-old Charles Dickens, to his great humiliation, was taken from school to work at Warren's Blacking Factory where his wages were 6s a week. On 20 February 1824 John Dickens was imprisoned in the Marshalsea Prison for debt, with Elizabeth Dickens and their four youngest children joining her husband there in April 1824. John Dickens was released after three months, on 28 May 1824, on the death of his mother who had left him the sum of £450 in her will, allowing him to clear his debt.
When John Dickens was released from prison Charles' mother did not immediately remove him from the boot-blacking factory which was owned by a relation of hers, James Lamert. However, a disagreement between John Dickens and Joseph Lamert, Charles' employer, resulted in his being removed from the blacking factory. Elizabeth Dickens did all she could to patch up the quarrel so that her son could return to work; John Dickens, however, insisted that his son should return to school. For the rest of his life Charles never forgave his mother for wanting to keep him in the factory.
A Christmas Carol
By the end of 1842 Dickens was a well-established author, having written six major works, as well as several short stories, novellas and other pieces. On 31 December that year he began publishing his novel "Martin Chuzzlewit" as a monthly serial; the novel was his favourite work, but sales were disappointing and he faced temporary financial difficulties.
The Life of Our Lord
The Life of Our Lord is a book about the life of Jesus Christ written by English novelist Charles Dickens, for his young children, between 1846 and 1849, at about the time that he was writing "David Copperfield". "The Life of Our Lord" was published in 1934, 64 years after Dickens' death.
Thomas Carlyle
Charles Dickens used Carlyle's work as a secondary source for the events of the French Revolution in his novel "A Tale of Two Cities".
History of modern literature
Between 1849 and 1861, Charles Dickens' prolific creative outpouring gave us "David Copperfield" (1849–1850), "Bleak House" (1852–1853), "Hard Times" (1854), "Little Dorrit" (1855–1857), "A Tale of Two Cities" (11 July 1859) and "Great Expectations" (1860–1861).
Nicholas Nickleby (disambiguation)
Nicholas Nickleby is a novel by Charles Dickens published as a serial from 1838 to 1839.
Augustus Dickens
Augustus Newnham Dickens (10 November 1827 – 4 October 1866) was the youngest brother of English novelist Charles Dickens, and the inspiration for Charles's pen name 'Boz'.
Tavistock House
Tavistock House was the London home of the noted British author Charles Dickens and his family from 1851 to 1860. At Tavistock House Dickens wrote "Bleak House", "Hard Times", "Little Dorrit" and "A Tale of Two Cities". He also put on amateur theatricals there which are described in John Forster's "Life of Charles Dickens". Later, it was the home of William and Georgina Weldon, whose lodger was the French composer Charles Gounod, who composed part of his opera "Polyeucte" at the house.
Cedric Charles Dickens
Cedric David Charles Dickens (24 September 1916 – 11 February 2006) was an English author and businessman, and the last surviving great-grandson of Charles Dickens and steward of his literary legacy.
Social novel
Social problems are also an important concern in the novels of Charles Dickens, including in particular poverty and the unhealthy living conditions associated with it, the exploitation of ordinary people by money lenders, the corruption and incompetence of the legal system, as well as of the administration of the Poor Law. Dickens 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 destroyed middle class polemics about criminals, making any pretence to ignorance about what poverty entailed impossible. Charles Dickens's "Hard Times" (1854) is set in a small Midlands industrial town. It particularly criticizes the effect of Utilitarianism on the lives of the working classes in cities. John Ruskin declared "Hard Times" to be his favourite Dickens' work due to its exploration of important social questions. Walter Allen characterised "Hard Times" as being an unsurpassed "critique of industrial society", though later superseded by works of D. H. Lawrence. 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". On the other hand, George Orwell, in his essay on Dickens, wrote, "There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much society as 'human nature'."
Cliffhanger
Cliffhangers became prominent with the serial publication of narrative fiction, pioneered by Charles Dickens. Printed episodically in magazines, Dickens’s cliffhangers triggered desperation in his readers. Writing in the "New Yorker", Emily Nussbaum captured the anticipation of those waiting for the next installment of Dickens' "The Old Curiosity Shop";
English novel
It was in the Victorian era (1837–1901) that the novel became the leading literary genre in English. Another important fact is the number of women novelists who were successful in the 19th century, even though they often had to use a masculine pseudonym. At the beginning of the 19th century most novels were published in three volumes. However, monthly serialization was revived with the publication of Charles Dickens' "Pickwick Papers" in twenty parts between April 1836 and November 1837. Demand was high for each episode to introduce some new element, whether it was a plot twist or a new character, so as to maintain the readers' interest. Both Dickens and Thackeray frequently published this way.
Dickens (disambiguation)
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was an English writer and social critic.
The Bonfire of the Vanities
The novel was originally conceived as a serial in the style of Charles Dickens' writings; it ran in 27 installments in "Rolling Stone" starting in 1984. Wolfe heavily revised it before it was published in book form. The novel was a bestseller and a phenomenal success, even in comparison with Wolfe's other books. It has often been called the quintessential novel of the 1980s.
Charles Dickens
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.
East End of London in popular culture
Charles Dickens (1812–70), throughout his work, draws extensively on his experiences of poverty in London. His godfather had a sail making business in Limehouse, and he based the "Six Jolly Fellowship Porters" in "Our Mutual Friend" (1864–65) on a public house still standing there. The Red Bull, a now demolished inn situated in Whitechapel, features in his "Pickwick Papers". On leaving it Sam Weller makes the sage remark that Whitechapel is "not a wery nice neighbourhood". Fagin in Dickens's "Oliver Twist" appears to be based on a notorious 'fence' named Ikey Solomon (1785–1850) who operated in 1820's Whitechapel. Dickens was also a frequent visitor to the East End theatres and music halls of Hoxton, Shoreditch and Whitechapel, writing of his visits in his journals and his journalism. A visit he made to an opium den in Bluegate Fields inspired certain scenes in his last, unfinished, novel "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" (1870).
Arthur Morrison (1863–1945), who was a native East-Ender, wrote "A Child of the Jago" (1896) a fictional account of the extreme poverty encountered in the Old Nichol Street Rookery. Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) observed the practice of 'people of quality' visiting the many entertainments available in Whitechapel and sent his hedonistic hero Dorian Gray there to sample the delights on offer in his novel "The Picture of Dorian Gray".
Charles Dickens
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.
Charles Dickens
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 at 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 to return to Britain, barely escaping a Federal Tax Lien against the proceeds of his lecture tour.
Charles Dickens
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".
Charles Dickens
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. Dickens started to write "David Copperfield" in 1848. It was published between 1849 and 1850. Scholars consider it as Dickens's veiled autobiography with the title character modeled after the author himself. It was Dickens's personal favourite among his own novels.
1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die
The list contains 1001 titles and is made up of novels, short stories, and short story collections. There is also one pamphlet ("A Modest Proposal"), one book of collected text (""), and one graphic novel ("Watchmen"). The most featured authors on the list are J. M. Coetzee and Charles Dickens with ten titles each.
Letters of Charles Dickens
1938 saw the publication in three volumes of almost 6,000 of the letters, edited by Walter Dexter as part of the Nonesuch Edition of Dickens's Works. This was an expensively-priced edition limited to 877 copies, and was therefore not easily accessible to the ordinary reader unless he had either ample means or access to a university library. Moreover, Dexter's editorial practices were far from rigorous: there was hardly any annotation, and many of the letters were simply copied from previous editions rather than from the originals, with the inevitable result that the texts were not always accurate.
Gerald Charles Dickens (actor)
Based on the readings performed by Charles Dickens himself during his own British and American tours, Gerald Dickens performs extracts from "The Pickwick Papers", "David Copperfield", "Oliver Twist", "Great Expectations", "Nicholas Nickleby" and "A Christmas Carol" among others, in the latter creating 26 characters in a performance described by "The New York Times" as "a once in a lifetime brush with literary history."
Writing style
"A Tale of Two Cities" (1859) by Charles Dickens:
A Christmas Carol
The writer Charles Dickens was born to a middle-class family which got into financial difficulties as a result of the spendthrift nature of his father John. In 1824 John was committed to the Marshalsea, a debtors' prison in Southwark, London. Dickens, aged 12, was forced to pawn his collection of books, leave school and work at a dirty and rat-infested shoe-blacking factory. The change in circumstances gave him what his biographer, Michael Slater, describes as a "deep personal and social outrage", which heavily influenced his writing and outlook.
Charles Dickens
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.
The Old Curiosity Shop
The Old Curiosity Shop is one of two novels (the other being "Barnaby Rudge") which Charles Dickens published along with short stories in his weekly serial "Master Humphrey's Clock", from 1840 to 1841. It was so popular that New York readers stormed the wharf when the ship bearing the final installment arrived in 1841. "The Old Curiosity Shop" was printed in book form in 1841.
Charles Dickens
Dickens favoured the style of the 18th-century picaresque novels that he found in abundance on his father's shelves. According to Ackroyd, other than these, perhaps the most important literary influence on him was derived from the fables of "The Arabian Nights".
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.
Charles Dickens bibliography
A chronological list of Dickens' major works
Editing and publication of Dickens's letters started in 1949 when publisher Rupert Hart-Davis persuaded Humphry House of Wadham College, Oxford, to edit a complete edition of the letters. House died suddenly aged 46 in 1955. However, the work continued, and by 1997 Volume 9 had been published.
Charles Dickens
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 modeled the character of Agnes Wickfield after Georgina and Mary.
He described his impressions in a travelogue, "American Notes for General Circulation". Dickens includes in "Notes" 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.
Letters of Charles Dickens
In contrast, few letters to Dickens are known. Dickens often expressed his opposition to the publication of private letters, and was determined to suffer from it himself as little as possible. He burned those letters that had been sent to him in a mass bonfire in 1860, commenting, "Would to God that every letter I had ever written was on that pile". He burned more in 1869, the year before he died. As a result, hardly more than 250 letters to Dickens have survived to the present day.
Charles den Tex
Charles den Tex published his first crime novel, "Dump", in 1995. he has written 10 crime novels, two short stories and a dictionary on the jargon of management and consultancy. Seven of his novels have been nominated to Gouden Strop Prize and has received the prize for three.
Hard Times (novel)
Hard Times – For These Times (commonly known as Hard Times) is the tenth novel by Charles Dickens, first published in 1854. The book surveys English society and satirises the social and economic conditions of the era.
Letters of Charles Dickens
In 1878 it was announced that a collection of Dickens's letters would be edited by his sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth. In collaboration with Dickens's eldest daughter Mary she duly produced "The Letters of Charles Dickens" in three volumes, which were published by Chapman & Hall between 1880 and 1882. A second edition in two volumes followed in 1882, and a third in one volume, published by Macmillan, in 1893. Altogether they included roughly a thousand letters, many were heavily cut for reasons of taste, and some were created by cut-and-pasting together extracts from several different letters in a way which was considered unacceptable even by late-Victorian standards.
Stafford Dickens
Screenwriter
Racism in the work of Charles Dickens
"The Perils of Certain English Prisoners" is an early work of fiction co-authored by Dickens and Wilkie Collins dealing allegorically with the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Patrick Brantlinger regards it as melodramatic and wildly inaccurate. It appeared in the 1857 Christmas number of "Household Words". In "Perils" Dickens describes the "native Sambo", a paradigm of the Indian mutineers, as a "double-dyed traitor, and a most infernal villain" who takes part in a massacre of women and children, in an allusion to the Cawnpore Massacre. Dickens was much incensed by the massacre in which over a hundred English prisoners, most of them women and children, were killed, and on 4 October 1857 Dickens wrote in a private letter to Baroness Burdett-Coutts: "I wish I were the Commander in Chief in India ... I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested ... proceeding, with all convenient dispatch and merciful swiftness of execution, to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the earth."
Lillian Nayder has noted that Dickens collaborator, Wilkie Collins, lacked his hostility to the Indian people, nor faulted them for the mutiny to the degree that Dickens did. In Collins own work "A Sermon for the Sepoys", he preaches to the Indian mutineers from an Indian sacred text, not a Christian one. Collins disassociates himself from Dickens privately expressed desire to exterminate the Indian race, but instead appeals to their capacity for moral goodness. Moreover, Collins' famous novel "The Moonstone" suggests that it is really the Indians who were mainly on the defensive during the mutiny, not the British, contrary to the prevalent impression given by the British press.
Augustus Dickens
Augustus Dickens was the son of Elizabeth ("née" Barrow) and John Dickens, a clerk in the Navy Pay Office at Portsmouth. Charles Dickens's pen name, 'Boz', was actually taken from his youngest brother's family nickname 'Moses', given to him in honour of one of the brothers in "The Vicar of Wakefield" (one of the most widely read novels in the early 19th century), which when playfully pronounced through the nose became corrupted as 'Boses', and later shortened to 'Boz' – pronounced with a long vowel 'o' through the nose.
Charles Dickens bibliography
The bibliography of Charles Dickens (1812–70) includes more than a dozen major novels, a large number of short stories (including Christmas-themed stories and ghost stories), several plays, several non-fiction books, and individual essays and articles. Dickens's novels were serialized initially in weekly or monthly magazines, then reprinted in standard book formats.
Charles Dickens
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.
Dora Annie Dickens
Dora Annie Dickens (16 August 1850 – 14 April 1851) was the infant daughter of English novelist Charles Dickens and his wife Catherine. She was the ninth of their ten children, and the youngest of their three daughters.
John Dickens
The son of William Dickens (1719–1785) and Elizabeth Ball (1745–1824), John Dickens was a clerk in the Royal Navy Pay Office at Portsmouth in Hampshire. On 13 June 1809 at St Mary le Strand, London, he married Elizabeth Barrow, with whom he had eight children. He was later transferred to London and then to Chatham, returning to live in Camden Town in London in 1822 to work in Somerset House. John Dickens found it difficult to provide for his growing family on his meagre income. Soon his debts had become so severe that all the household goods were sold in an attempt to pay his bills, including furniture and silverware. He had a previous wife before his Elizabeth, he had ten children in all and his oldest was Frances Dickens whilst his oldest son was Charles Dickens. John's debts became too much and he was put in a prison for debtors. This predicament caused Charles to leave school at the age of twelve to work in a factory, as he had become 'the man of the house' and the breadwinner in his father's absence.
Victorian literature
While in the preceding Romantic period, poetry had been the dominant genre, it was the novel that was most important in the Victorian period. Charles Dickens (1812–1870) dominated the first part of Victoria's reign: his first novel, "The Pickwick Papers", was published in 1836, and his last "Our Mutual Friend" between 1864–5. William Thackeray's (1811–1863) most famous work "Vanity Fair" appeared in 1848, and the three Brontë sisters, Charlotte (1816–55), Emily (1818–48) and Anne (1820–49), also published significant works in the 1840s. A major later novel was George Eliot's (1819–80) "Middlemarch" (1872), while the major novelist of the later part of Queen Victoria's reign was Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), whose first novel, "Under the Greenwood Tree", appeared in 1872 and his last, "Jude the Obscure", in 1895.
Charles Gibbon
A three-volume novel "Dangerous Connexions" was published by Gibbon in 1864, which had a second edition in 1875. "The Dead Heart" followed in 1865, and Gibbon went on to publish some thirty novels, including were "Robin Gray" (1869; other editions 1872 and 1877) and "For Lack of Gold" (1871; other editions 1873 and 1877). Gibbon's Scottish novels have been compared with those of William Black. Ten novels featured "Detective Dier", a character based on Edmund Reid, who was a friend of Gibbon's.
Charles Dickens
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. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era.
Alfred D'Orsay Tennyson Dickens
Alfred D'Orsay Tennyson Dickens (28 October 1845 – 2 January 1912) was the sixth child and fourth son of English novelist Charles Dickens and his wife Catherine. He made lecture tours in Australia, Europe and the United States on his father's life and work.
Our Mutual Friend
Our Mutual Friend, written in the years 1864–65, is the last novel completed by Charles Dickens and is one of his most sophisticated works, combining savage satire with social analysis. It centres on, in the words of critic J. Hillis Miller, quoting from the character Bella Wilfer in the book, "money, money, money, and what money can make of life."
Our Mutual Friend
"Our Mutual Friend" was published in nineteen monthly numbers, in the fashion of many earlier Dickens novels, for the first time since "Little Dorrit" (1855–57). "A Tale of Two Cities" (1859) and "Great Expectations" (1860–1) had been serialised in Dickens's weekly magazine "All the Year Round." Dickens remarked to Wilkie Collins that he was "quite dazed" at the prospect of putting out twenty monthly parts after more recent weekly serials.
Philip K. Dick bibliography
The bibliography of Philip K. Dick includes 44 novels, 121 short stories, and 14 short story collections published by American science fiction author Philip K. Dick (December 16, 1928 – March 2, 1982) during his lifetime.
At the time of his death, Dick's work was generally known to only science fiction readers, and many of his novels and short stories were out of print. To date, a total of 44 novels have been published and translations have appeared in 25 languages. Six volumes of selected correspondence, written by Dick from 1938 through 1982, were published between 1991 and 2009.
Catherine Dickens
Catherine Thomson "Kate" Dickens ("née" Hogarth; 19 May 1815 – 22 November 1879) was the wife of English novelist Charles Dickens, and the mother of his ten children.
Henry Fielding Dickens
Henry 'Harry' Dickens married Marie Roche (1852–1940), the daughter of Monsieur Antonin Roche, on 25 October 1876 in Portman Square in London; they had four sons and three daughters together. Within the Dickens family the couple were known as 'The Guvnor' and 'The Mater'. Their son Philip Charles Dickens is buried beside them in Putney Vale Cemetery in London, while a second son, Henry Charles Dickens, was the father of the author Monica Dickens. Henry Charles was a long serving member of Kensington Council in London where he was very active in improving housing in the poorer part of the borough after World War II; a block of flats in North Kensington is named after him. On his retirement when the borough was amalgamated with Chelsea in 1955 he was created an honorary Freeman. A third son, Cedric 'Ceddy' Dickens, fell in action at the Battle of the Somme in World War I.
English novel
The 1830s and 1840s saw the rise of social novel, also known as social problem novel, that "arose out of the social and political upheavals which followed the Reform Act of 1832". This was in many ways a reaction to rapid industrialization, and the social, political and economic issues associated with it, and was a means of commenting on abuses of government and industry and the suffering of the poor, who were not profiting from England's economic prosperity. Stories of the working class poor were directed toward middle class to help create sympathy and promote change. An early example is Charles Dickens' "Oliver Twist" (1837–38).
Charles Dickens emerged on the literary scene in the 1830s with the two novels already mentioned. Dickens wrote vividly about London life and struggles of the poor, but in a good-humoured fashion, accessible to readers of all classes. One of his most popular works to this day is "A Christmas Carol" (1843). In more recent years Dickens has been most admired for his later novels, such as "Dombey and Son" (1846–48), "Great Expectations" (1860–61), "Bleak House" (1852–53) and "Little Dorrit" (1855–57) and "Our Mutual Friend" (1864–65). An early rival to Dickens was William Makepeace Thackeray, who during the Victorian period ranked second only to him, but he is now much less read and is known almost exclusively for "Vanity Fair" (1847). In that novel he satirizes whole swaths of humanity while retaining a light touch. It features his most memorable character, the engagingly roguish Becky Sharp.
Dickens World
Dickens World was based around the life of author Charles Dickens, briefly a resident of Chatham as a child and who, as an adult, lived at Gad's Hill Place in nearby Higham. Many of the locations and characters in his novels are based on buildings, places and people of the Medway Towns. Holcombe Manor was the inspiration for Dingley Dell, the house in Pickwick Papers, and some of Edwin Drood takes place in Rochester Cathedral.
The Cricket on the Hearth
Dickens described the novel as "quiet and domestic [...] innocent and pretty." It is subdivided into chapters called "Chirps", similar to the "Quarters" of "The Chimes" or the "Staves" of "A Christmas Carol". It is the third of Dickens's five Christmas books, preceded by "A Christmas Carol" (1843) and "The Chimes" (1844), and followed by "The Battle of Life" (1846) and "The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain" (1848).
Charles Dickens
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 instalment 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.
Charles Dickens
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 to be 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.
Bleak House
George Gissing and G. K. Chesterton are among those literary critics and writers who consider "Bleak House" to be the best novel that Charles Dickens wrote. As Chesterton put it: ""Bleak House" is not certainly Dickens's best book; but perhaps it is his best novel". Harold Bloom, in his book "The Western Canon", considers "Bleak House" to be Dickens's greatest novel. Daniel Burt, in his book "The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time", ranks "Bleak House" number 12. Horror and supernatural fiction author Stephen King named it among his top 10 favourite books.
Mary Hogarth
Mary Scott Hogarth (26 October 1819 – 7 May 1837) was the sister of Catherine Dickens ( Hogarth) and the sister-in-law of Charles Dickens. Hogarth first met Charles Dickens aged 14, and after Dickens married Hogarth's sister Catherine, Mary lived with the couple for a year. Hogarth died suddenly in 1837, which caused Dickens to miss the publication dates for two novels: "The Pickwick Papers" and "Oliver Twist". Hogarth later became the inspiration for a number of characters in Dickens novels, including Rose Maylie in "Oliver Twist" and Little Nell in "The Old Curiosity Shop". Charles and Catherine Dickens' first child was named Mary in her memory.
The Pickwick Papers (disambiguation)
The Pickwick Papers is the first novel by Charles Dickens.