The England that Charles Dickens made famous in celebrated classics such as Oliver Twist , David Copperfield , and A Christmas Carol was a fascinating mix of mysterious fogs, grimy London streets, guileless protagonists, and unscrupulous villains. It was also a country badly in need of improvement and reform. Crime was on the rise. Pollution was widespread, and disease ran rampant. Aristocrats enjoyed lives of power and affluence in grand mansions and sprawling country estates, while the poor lived in reeking slums, worked for pennies in gloomy factories and sweatshops, and regularly died in the street from cold and hunger.

The man who entertained millions while highlighting such nineteenth-century social conditions was neither an aristocrat nor a pauper. Born on February 7, 1812, to middle-class parents who lived in Landport (now part of Portsmouth ), England, Charles Dickens grew up to be a wealthy and...