Not only was Dickens a popular recorder of the life of his times, but he was also an incredibly successful man of letters. One of the more interesting aspects of Dickens life, in fact, was the degree of popularity which he experienced during his lifetime. There was no
la vie boheme for Dickens, no artistic squalor or neglect of his works. From the age of twenty-four, with publication of
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, Dickens was an amazing literary success on both sides of the Atlantic. By the age of thirty he had five immensely popular and immense novels under his belt, including such perennial favorites as
Oliver Twist and
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. His early period of creativity was marked by a proclivity to humor and the picaresque, and early on his readership marveled at his assortment of characters. If a Dickens plot was not always of clockwork fastidiousness, the author more than made up for it with a host of leading and secondary characters that would make a Hollywood casting director envious. It has been reckoned that Dickens created over 2,000 such characters during his relatively short creative life.
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