The life story of Charles Dickens is, from several perspectives, a success story. Generally regarded today as one of the greatest novelists in the English language, Dickens had the unusual good fortune to have been recognized by his contemporaries as...

The life story of Charles Dickens is, from several perspectives, a success story. Generally regarded today as one of the greatest novelists in the English language, Dickens had the unusual good fortune to have been recognized by his contemporaries as...

From the appearance of his first full-length work of prose fiction, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, in 1836-1837, Charles Dickens has retained his place as one of the best-loved and most widely read novelists in the world. Not so well known...

He was only fifty-eight when he died. His horse had been shot, as he had wanted; his body lay in a casket in his home at Gad's Hill, festooned with scarlet geraniums. Tributes poured in from all over his native England and from around the world....

In October 1844 Charles Dickens was in Genoa working on his second Christmas book, The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In (1845). Hoping that a long foreign residence would refresh his powers of description...

Charles Dickens had one thing in common with his creation Thomas Gradgrind, the heartless utilitarian in Hard Times: a love of facts. Along with fourteen novels, many of them rich in topical allusion, Dickens produced a body of work as reporter,...

Drawing his narrative themes from the sensation novel and the popular stage, Charles Dickens heavily freighted most of his plots with mystery, crime, and suspense. His chief legacies to crime literature, as it is narrowly understood, include his...

The English author Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812-1870) was, and probably still is, the most widely read Victorian novelist. He is now appreciated more for his "dark" novels than for his humorous works. Charles Dickens was born on Feb. 7, 1812, at...