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, essayist, correspondent, and editor that constitutes a lifelong account of the facts of Victorian life as he knew them. However, this nonfiction is anything but a mere collection of Gradgrindian data. In his reporting and commentary, Dickens is often an outraged reformer, uncompromising in his attacks on privileged interests. In the early sketches, he is a writer trying to achieve a synthesis of art and social criticism. The surviving letters, some 14,500 of which the editors of the ongoing Pilgrim Edition have collected, reveal a man of astonishing energies, who attempted to impose an artist's vision of order on every aspect of his life and work. In the...