best biography dickens

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The Best Fiction Books » Classic English Literature

The best charles dickens books, recommended by jenny hartley.

Charles Dickens: An Introduction by Jenny Hartley

He was the most popular novelist of the Victorian era, a convivial family man who always championed the underdog. But he also harboured dark secrets that only came out after his death. Jenny Hartley recommends the best books by and about Charles Dickens and discusses Dickens the phenomenon, past and present.

Interview by Sophie Roell , Editor

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin

The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens by Jenny Hartley

Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies by John Bowen and Robert I. Patten

1 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

2 great expectations by charles dickens, 3 charles dickens: a life by claire tomalin, 4 the selected letters of charles dickens by jenny hartley, 5 palgrave advances in charles dickens studies by john bowen and robert i. patten.

B efore we discuss the books, you’ve been president of the Dickens Fellowship, you’re currently working at the Charles Dickens Museum, and your academic life has focused on Dickens. My first question has to be: how did you get so interested in Charles Dickens ?

I remember being enthralled by an abridged version of  David Copperfield as a child. But I was listening to  A Tale of Two Cities recently and I guess I find the language a little bit inaccessible. I’m interested in Charles Dickens, but more because of his social criticism and the historical element. Is that true for you as well? 

The 19th century is my area so I don’t find the language a block, but I know people do. I found that increasingly with the students before I retired. ‘The sentences are long. The books are long.’ These days people Tweet. It’s about how you meet the written word, and it is sometimes difficult for people.

“That’s what characters in Dickens do: they step out of the novels and they roam the world.”

The great thing people say is, ‘Oh I was put off him at school!’ which is sad. You can read authors too early. Although, when George Orwell read  David Copperfield   as a nine-year-old, he said he thought it was written by a child because it has that immediacy, that sense of what it is like to be a child, which I think is wonderful.

It’s clearly full of jokes. I sometimes think if he were writing now, I’d find it absolutely hilarious, but because it’s set a hundred years ago, I’m missing quite a few of the references.

I don’t find the humour time-sensitive in that way. There is the social critique you mentioned earlier—he is always for the underdog, he’s a radical—and all that is, of course, terribly moving. But the first thing that always gets me is the humour. It’s pretty sharp, some of it.

So tell me your favourite bit, what makes you laugh the most?

In my book I start with a quote, that bit from  Oliver Twist   about asking for more. You think, ‘Oh this is going to be so moving!’ but then there’s this reference to the little boy who sleeps next to him, whose father had owned a cook shop. He says he wasn’t used to being hungry and that he’s afraid that one night he might happen to eat the boy lying next to him. And you think, ‘What?’ Suddenly you’re in the world of cannibals. Just a little thing like that. Lots of people can write social critique and they did, but he’s got that angle: you just can’t resist it. It’s a shame that gets lost because otherwise he gets a little bit earnest and worthy. He was earnest, but he was other things as well.

In your book you refer to the extraordinary phenomenon of Charles Dickens—he was the most popular novelist of the Victorian age. Why do you think he was so widely read at the time?

Dickens took great pains to be accessible because he published his books in cheap parts. It meant that you only had to have a shilling a month to read those huge novels. They’re wonderful stories as well. There were public readings, so, at a lodging house, someone would read and you would just listen. Maybe you couldn’t even read yourself, but you could join in. I think the great Dickens phenomenon is about joining in, it is about being part of that whole world of characters. It’s a sort of aura that you’re partaking of, almost.

In your book, you also put emphasis on Charles Dickens’s theatrical work.

Yes, he enjoyed being part of the group, part of the party. He loved parties. His first love was the theatre. He adored it. He wanted to be an actor. In a way, a lot of his characters are performing themselves. He starts from the outside. I think that feeling of being a live gig does energise him.

“He used to drink sherry and egg white, all sorts of things to get himself hyped up.”

Later in life, he did these public readings that must have been electric. We call them readings, which makes them sound a bit flat. They were more one-man shows. He memorised them. He had the book there but he didn’t use it. They must have been absolutely extraordinary: everybody who went said they were.

And these readings were also what killed him?

Yes, his doctor used to say, ‘Oh you must stop this because of your blood pressure.’ In fact, he did die of a stroke so, obviously, his blood pressure was way up there. He overdid it. He did this tour of America in 1867-68 which was the end for him. He died a young man: he was 58.

He wanted to make money, and that was a relatively easy way of doing it—or so he thought—but he also did get energised by it. He used to drink sherry and egg white, all sorts of things to get himself hyped up, and then he had to lie down afterwards, and completely collapse. His doctor told him to stop. He had a farewell tour in London which he actually cut short because he got too ill to finish it. I wish I’d been there.

Another thing that I didn’t know until reading your book is the importance of the illustrations in his books. He paid great attention to those, didn’t he?

Yes, very much so, and he would give very minute instructions to his illustrators. He worked with a lot of illustrators, but for most of his books, the main one was Hablot Knight Browne. Pretty well all of the books had two illustrations a month — very detailed, full of character, loads of characters in them, that feeling of plenitude that you get, of a crowd—just like the novels—and absolutely brilliant.

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In a way, it links with his sense of the visual. When he started writing sketches for newspapers and magazines, he was a journalist. He is always observing, observing, observing with a very minute attention to detail.

He was based here in London , and you get that sense of what London was like. As Walter Bagehot said (in 1858), Dickens describes London “like a special correspondent for posterity.” And he is. You can walk around London with him. How it’s changed! Some of the slum areas he describes with fascination—around Leicester Square and Seven Dials—are quite posh now.

So turning to the books you’re recommending, the first one you’ve chosen is by Charles Dickens. This is David Copperfield , which was first published in 19 one-shilling instalments in 1849. This is the book Dickens himself called his favourite novel and it’s sort of autobiographical, is that right?

It is, yes. David becomes a writer, and is successful. But it’s more about the opening chapters. Just before he wrote David Copperfield , he wrote what is called an ‘autobiographical fragment,’ which he gave to his friend Forster. Forster later incorporated it into his biography. That fragment is really the opening chapters of  David Copperfield .

“That famous Victorian imperative: “Make ’em laugh; make ’em cry; make ’em wait.” It does all that in that spades.”

That’s how we know about his prison episode, when his father was in prison for debt. As happened in those days, the whole family would go to prison with you — all except the two oldest children, Charles and his sister. Charles is put to work in a blacking warehouse, pasting labels on bottles of shoe blacking. It was the most terrible experience for him because he thought he’d been abandoned. He felt completely abandoned. You would, wouldn’t you? He was 12 and he just thought, ‘This is it.’ That trauma comes across extremely vividly in David Copperfield .

But it’s not just about that: it’s about that whole experience of the child growing up, the idyll with your mother. Then she remarries because his father dies, and she remarries this monster, Mr Murdstone. The book has got some of the most wonderful characters in it, the nastiest villains and the most charming villains, like Steerforth, who is completely charming and yet awful.

That famous Victorian imperative: “Make ’em laugh; make ’em cry; make ’em wait.” It does all that in that spades. It’s no surprise I would choose it because it’s consistently listed among the top novels of all time. Are you enjoying it?

Yes, I’m listening to it with my children, because we spend quite a lot of time in the car. It’s 36 hours! But a friend of mine, who teaches Victorian literature at Boston University, told me the Audible narrations of Charles Dickens books are really good so I thought I would give it a go. The narrator for David Copperfield is the actor Richard Armitage, and he puts on voices and accents and makes it quite fun, so the kids are enjoying it too. Do most critics see this as his best novel as well?

I think a lot of people do. His critical reception has changed over the years. During his lifetime, people liked the earliest stuff like The Pickwick Papers , which is very funny. I don’t find that so funny. The later ones are the darker ones. David Copperfield is right in the middle of his career.

Freud gave it to his fiancée. It’s about the workings of memory. It has these retrospective chapters, where he looks back. To me, that’s absolutely fascinating.

I think it’s also a very moving book: about how he goes through life, the damage we do, how we grow up. The chapter, for instance, about David’s first drunken outing. He’s drunk in London and goes to the theatre. It’s so funny. Everybody goes through it, you have to drink too much at some point in your life, don’t you? — to know how much you can take. So he goes through those phases, with a great sense of good humour.

He also found it very moving himself, didn’t he? In one of his letters he says it made him cry.

You mention  Great Expectations (1860-1), which is the second Charles Dickens book you’ve chosen. When he first talks about writing this novel, he mentions “a very fine, new, and grotesque idea.”

He also talks about making it funny, because the novel before that had been  A Tale of Two Cities . Forster must have said to him something along the lines of, ‘It’s absolutely wonderful of course, but not many jokes.’ So Dickens starts this complete masterpiece.

I feel bad that I’ve chosen his two first person novels: none of the other ones were. In a way, it’s revisiting  David Copperfield , but it is very different in tone: sadder, more complex. But he does say to Forster, “I have put a child and a good-natured foolish man, in relations that seem to me very funny” — about Pip and Joe, who is his stepfather. The opening of Great Expectations —with the convict, Magwitch—is striking. There have been brilliant film versions of it.

“It is all about class, which is one of the great themes of the British novel.”

It’s a shorter book because it was a weekly. Dickens was running a magazine for the last 20 years of his life and the sales were not doing very well. He had planned  Great Expectations  as another big novel with monthly instalments. Then he realised he would have to do something to prop up sales of his magazine, so he said, ‘Right! I’ll change it, I’ll do it like this.’ He was really thinking on his feet—he always did—and maybe the conciseness of it suits it.

It is one of the most perfect novels ever written. It’s got a wonderful plot. It’s about good and bad money, you don’t know who Pip’s benefactor is, you’re wrong-footed—as he is—all the time. It’s about terrible damage. It’s got this fantastic suspense about what happens to Magwitch. It’s sad, but also it’s got wonderful humour in it and wonderful characters. It’s got Wemmick, one of the first commuters. It’s just brilliant.

When you say damage, you’re talking about what, in particular?

I’m thinking about Miss Havisham, who’s been jilted at the altar. She is one of the most famous images we have of a damaged person, completely stuck at that moment when she was about to be married in her wedding dress. She’s completely iconic, everybody knows who she is.

That’s what characters in Charles Dickens books do: they step out of the novels and they roam the world. We can recognise quite a lot of them. There aren’t that many writers whose characters do that. I would say maybe Shakespeare is the only other one I can think of. But Dickens is the one with the most characters who can survive outside their pages.

His idea of it being a grotesque idea, is that because Pip thinks he’s being supported by Miss Havisham and then has the shock of finding out that his newfound wealth came from someone he despised?

It certainly could be. Of course class is a huge part of that novel. It is all about class, which is one of the great themes of the British novel.  Great Expectations  is all about working your way up, as Dickens himself did. And, then, when you get there, was it worth it? What have I done on the way up?

Pip is always checking himself and when the blacksmith, Joe, comes to visit him in London he says, “I am afraid I was ashamed of the dear good fellow.” Then he checks himself and says, “I know I was ashamed of him.” It is that honesty, that blurring of ‘I think, no, I know,’ that checking into your feelings, which I think makes the book so powerful.

Do you think it has a happy ending?

It has six different endings. Dickens wrote, originally, a not-happy ending for it, which seems, to me, right. I don’t want to give too much away, but it doesn’t read like a book written by someone who’s had all success showered upon him. It reads like a man who has made peace with his life.

But when he showed the ending to his friend Bulwer-Lytton, who was a much less good novelist than Dickens was—I don’t know why Dickens listened to him, but he did do that, he always listened to his readers—Bulwer-Lytton said, ‘It’s too sad, you must change it.’ So the ending that we have is deliberately ambiguous. You can read it how you like.

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We’ve talked quite a lot about Charles Dickens as a person already. Your next choice is a biography:  Charles Dickens: A Life  by Claire Tomalin. It’s quite long, some 500 pages. Then I looked up a Guardian review which talked of “Claire Tomalin’s unrivalled talent for telling a story and keeping a reader enthralled: long as the book is, I wanted more.” Is it a real page turner?

Yes, absolutely. She is such a good biographer. I would read anything by her. She’s so intelligent. She is sympathetic to him but she is not blind to him. She had already written a book called  The Invisible Woman   about Dickens’s affair with Nelly Ternan, a young actress. In this book she writes about his whole life brilliantly, to my way of thinking. There are other biographies — I do think Michael Slater’s huge one , which is about Dickens’s writing life, is absolutely superb. But Claire’s is shorter and she opens it out more.

“People always say, ‘Oh, he was horrible to his wife.’ Well he was.”

She gets his energy, his ferocity. He could be callous. People always say, ‘Oh, he was horrible to his wife.’ Well he was. He chucked her out of the family home when the youngest child was only 6. He said she was a terrible mother, but we have no evidence of that, at all. So he did behave badly. I’m afraid that when marriages break down, people do.

She doesn’t blink that, but, at the same time, she does have this sense of a man who wants to do good, who believes that he can do good, and who, above all, is committed to his writing — which he absolutely was. She ends the book with this wonderful image of him writing late into the night. Sometimes he would ask the office boy to bring a bucket of water and he would put his hands and his head in it and then go on writing. That was his focus.

What do you think drove him?

He’d always loved stories. There’s a wonderful bit in  David Copperfield  about his childhood reading — all the characters who came to join him in his solitude after his mother made this horrible remarriage. He was always that bookish child. I suppose I think—and Claire Tomalin does as well—that there’s this thing called genius. You don’t really know where it comes from, but it just alights.

His desire to help the poor, that’s driven by the fact he suffered personally, isn’t it?

Definitely, that sense of, ‘There but for the grace of God, go I.’ If he hadn’t been yanked out of it, he could have been one of those children on the streets. He was a compulsive walker, and knew the streets of London like nobody else, he says. And he would see those children, those young people on his walks. He often walked at night. He knew that it was a very precarious thing. It’s that sense of precariousness—I could be on the streets, I could be in prison—that led him to help the women at Urania Cottage, which he helped set up. That sense of, ‘Yes, that could be me.’ And also, that you could help them, that it’s not irrevocable, they can be brought back.

So how much of on an impact did he have in terms of improving people’s lives?

His big ally in all this was Angela Burdett-Coutts. She was a philanthropist and inherited a share of Coutts bank, so she was very wealthy. They were friends. They joined forces on her causes, like the Ragged Schools, which were schools for the very poor. She was his partner in Urania Cottage. How much influence he had, you can never tell, but people said that he was one of the great influences of the time.

“He believed in the values of Christianity, of helping your neighbour and the essential goodness of people.”

If you think how popular A Christmas Carol was, and still is. That’s about helping the poor and the ‘worthy poor’ as they were known then. You should be decent.

And examine yourself at Christmas — because we all have elements of Scrooge.

Exactly so. And the idea of instant conversion, of New Year’s resolutions, that we can turn ourselves around. It’s a hugely popular book. He was a Christian, in a non-doctrinaire sense. He believed in the values of Christianity, of helping your neighbour and the essential goodness of people, really.

You emphasize Christmas in your own book about Dickens.

Yes, there’s a bit about Christmas because he is so associated with Christmas. When he died, a girl who worked in Covent Garden asked, “Will Father Christmas die too?” Even now you’ll find productions of A Christmas Carol everywhere at Christmas. There’s a wonderful muppets version.

Why are Charles Dickens books so associated with Christmas, is it because  A Christmas Carol  was so popular at the time?

Yes, partly. It also coincided with Christmas becoming more commercialised. Christmas trees came in in the 1840s. Prince Albert, who came from Germany, brought some Christmas traditions with him — like Christmas cards. There had always been a Christmas holiday, but a lot of the rituals we associate with Christmas really start to build up at that time. He did Christmas books after A Christmas Carol and other people did too. I don’t think there was much of a tradition of it before then.

Why do you think Charles Dickens’s books have been performed so much and in so many different ways? 

He gives you characters who are very welcoming to inhabit. They are very big. With Scrooge, you can inhabit the miser and he is melodramatic. His characters have that hugeness of melodrama, that emotional affect — because melodrama is very emotional. You root for people: the goody and the baddy. He deliberately embraces that popular form.

I think my first introduction to Dickens wasn’t a book, but a production of  Oliver Twist .

Your next book is The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens , which you edited and came out in 2012. I thought he had burned all his letters?

He burned all the letters that were sent to him, but obviously you can’t burn letters that you’ve sent to other people — because you haven’t got them anymore. But he said he would have burned those too, if he could have. He had a huge bonfire in 1860, just after his marriage collapsed. One critic said it must have been the most expensive bonfire of all time. Just think of all the people who were writing to him. He knew everyone.

He adored writing letters. He said he wrote about a dozen a day. To get a letter from him was like getting a gift and you would keep it. There are letters, in that collection, from chimney sweeps, from clock menders. They’re always funny, with jokes in them. We’ve got over 14,000 but there must have been many more. We know of whole collections that were destroyed, in things like the Blitz, for instance. Ones to his daughter Katey went up in a warehouse fire.

“Other men in his circle kept mistresses but he had to keep that side of his life secret because he was Mr. Family Values”

The first letter is from when he’s gone back to school after the blacking warehouse. He’s only about 13, and it’s to a friend about borrowing a dictionary. It’s got a joke about a wooden leg. Dickens adored wooden legs. There are loads of joke about wooden legs in his letters and novels. We probably don’t find wooden leg jokes funny anymore because we’re too PC, but he just thought they were very funny. It’s a bit of your body but it is not you. Where are the boundaries of the body? That kind of thing intrigues him. They’ve got this letter at the Charles Dickens Museum in Doughty Street. It’s just a tiny fragment, but it is amazing to me that it survived — a letter from a 13-year-old school boy. Why would you keep that? It’s just a note. But it survived and there it is.

He was writing letters continually until his death. We’ve got letters that he wrote the day he died. Apart from that autobiographical fragment, he never wrote an autobiography. He said he would one day, but he never did. He was quite a secretive person. He didn’t tell his children about the blacking warehouse or the prison or anything like that.

He didn’t tell them?

No, it was a secret. Well, I can see that if you’ve been in prison, you’re not keen to talk about it, necessarily. So his children didn’t know about it until after he died. He’d given that autobiographical fragment just to Forster, he didn’t give it to anybody else. I think his wife knew, but nobody else.

So it’s through his letters that you are given these wonderful glimpses, it’s Dickens by Dickens, if you like. You’re really up close to his life, which is lived so intensely. The amount of invitations! You could have a selection which was just invitations. One of my favourite letters to Forster just says something like, ‘Come at 6, chops await you.’ He was such a convivial man.

How can somebody who’s writing a dozen letters a day be secretive?

About his personal life. He kept Nelly, his mistress, secret. Other men in his circle kept mistresses, but he had to keep that side of his life secret because he was Mr. Family Values. So he was living a double life, towards the end of his life.

So at the time, people reading David Copperfield didn’t know that Dickens was writing partly from personal experience?

They had no idea. It was a novel, he’s just made it up. It only came out a couple of years after he died, when Forster wrote a biography of him. Dickens knew Forster was going to write it — he’d sort of appointed him. Forster says that now the world will know that behind this great genius lay this very precarious and difficult childhood.

Also, in Dickens’s will, the first legacy is to Ellen Ternan. So he knew that that would come out too after he died. It doesn’t say ‘to my mistress’ but he leaves 1000 pounds to her. So people would ask, ‘who is she?’ For many years, Dickensians would say she was a ‘family friend’ or something like that, but gradually the evidence built up till it is, now, absolutely certain that she was his mistress.

Did he live with her after he left his wife?

It was a secret life. He had this wonderful family house in Gadshill in Kent, which he’d always wanted to buy. When he was a child, they’d go past this house and his father said, ‘Oh one day you might earn enough to live there.’ This was the myth, anyway, that Dickens told. So he did buy this house and you can visit it in Kent. He also had a flat above the office in London.

But he also had a series of houses that he rented under the name Charles Tringham for Nelly to live in and he would visit her. They were in Slough and in Peckham. He worked the railway timetables. He wanted quick journeys up and down from London. And they had trips to Paris. They had a house they lived in outside Boulogne.

So he continued living with his wife?

No, she was expelled in 1858. From then on, Dickens lived either above the office in Wellington Street in London or in Gadshill, where his children lived. They had had a big London house, which they gave up the lease of, in Tavistock Square. It was a very divided life. In the novel he wrote in 1859, A Tale of Two Cities , he talks about how we all have secret lives. He talks about how when he goes into a city, how amazing it is to think of all these secrets in every house. You bet!

He exchanges letters with Queen Victoria as well, doesn’t he? Or at least her adviser.

When you think how famous he was actually, he wasn’t honoured in the way that we would honour writers now. There’s a wonderful quote about Oliver Twist  in her diary, she’s trying to get her prime minister, Lord Melbourne, to read it and he says ‘Oh no, I don’t like such things.’ But much later, right towards the end of his life, her equerry arranges an audience with Queen Victoria. He’s such a radical, but, on the other hand, he was obviously very pleased to go. There seems to have been a suggestion that he would have been given some honour, but he died quite soon after.

What do you make of the letters he writes to his children?

He loved them when they were little, and when they get older…it’s very difficult to have a famous father. He would say things like, ‘When I was your age, I had to earn my living.’ He obviously started work very early, as a solicitor’s clerk and a journalist. He sends a couple of them out to the colonies. They went to Australia. One of them was only 16 when he went. I think it was a great pressure on them, really. I think it was easier to be a daughter than a son.

I read the one where he’s writing about his son Sydney saying, ‘Oh, he’s as good as dead.’

He was the one who went to sea. He writes about him so affectionately and so movingly when he was younger. People think he’s trying to write Sydney off but he had been ill. He did die soon after Dickens.

I got that impression—that he was sick—but it was an odd way for somebody to be writing about a sick child.

As your last book you’ve chosen a work of criticism: Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies (2006), which says, in the introduction, that it’s an exciting time to be studying Charles Dickens.

I’ve chosen a collection of essays because it gives you lots of different ways into Dickens. It includes some of the best critics who are writing at the moment: the editors, John Bowen and Robert Patten are both excellent. These are some of the best Dickens critics collected in one volume. You also get all these different aspects, like “Psychoanalyzing Dickens” by Carolyn Dever.

If you were going to read one critical book, this would be a good one to have. Some critical stuff can weigh you down a bit, but this one is written very accessibly. Each person writes very clearly. They are also excited by Dickens — and that comes across really well. Particularly, for instance, some aspects that had maybe got a bit muted, like the visual that we were talking about earlier.

Is there one essay in the book that you particularly love?

I think Rosemarie Bodenheimer is an absolutely terrific critic of Charles Dickens. Her chapter is, “Dickens and the Writing of a Life.” She talks about the energy of Dickens and uses the letters as a lens to look at the novels. She’s done a whole book on that and she does it quite briefly here, but she writes about him really intelligently. She looks back through past critics. Some of the best ones were actually novelists themselves. George Gissing, the novelist, wrote terribly well about Dickens and so did GK Chesterton. They really get him, and I think she does as well.

Because he was quite extraordinary. It was Peter Ackroyd who wrote about “the essential strangeness of the man” and I think a lot of these critics get into that in different ways. He really is a novelist like no other, and, in a way, you need lots of critics to give you different angles on that and, in this book, they do.

A lot of people have criticised Dickens, because he can’t do interior, he can’t do psychology. Yes, he is not George Eliot, but he does it from the outside in. So he gives you people’s tics, their way of behaving. We talk about body language quite happily now, but Victorians didn’t. We understand how to read somebody from the outside. That’s a great gift that he has given to us, if you like. Malcolm Andrews talks about that really well. So you can read a character by what they are wearing, how they speak, the little tics of behaviour. Other novelists pay tribute to Dickens for doing that.

I don’t see why it should necessarily be better to be inside someone’s head rather than looking in from the outside.

We’ve had a whole thing of going into people’s heads, George Elio t gave us people’s inside, as did Henry James —at great length—the minute turns of thought. Dickens didn’t do that. Maybe now we can see it again, but of course his length is against him. If you were to give someone an 800-page novel, they would flinch.

The word ‘picaresque’ comes up quite a bit in works of criticism on Dickens.

Yes, the idea of journeying, being episodic. I actually think he had a much tighter hold on the plot than that. Sometimes the plots are a bit ridiculous— these wills that suddenly turn up, somebody’s third grandchild has inherited—but I think he wants to show that there is a plan to the world. Maybe it goes back to religion, but there is a shape and a meaning.

Dickens , I suppose, went out of fashion because he says, ‘No, we are all connected. In Bleak House he famously says, ‘What can be the connection between all these people in London?’ And he shows there is a connection, a moral connection. In that book, the connection is partly through disease. We can affect each other that way so we are connected in a very real way. The character at the bottom of society can infect the character at the top of society, and our actions do have consequences.

The word ‘picaresque’ suggests something that goes on and on like a soap opera. His books have been compared to soap operas. Which, in a way, is great. They do have that melodramatic aspect, it’s a popular form. But they also have shape and a universe and a meaning. Everything belongs, everything fits together.

December 9, 2016

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Jenny Hartley

Jenny Hartley is a former president of the Dickens Fellowship and Professor at the University of Roehampton.

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Major Biographies of Dickens — a Critical Overview

Philip v. allingham , contributing editor, victorian web; faculty of education, lakehead university.

[ Victorian Web Home —> Authors —> Charles Dickens —> Works —> Literary Relations —> Theme and Subject —> Image, Symbol, and Motif ]

came to no other man, and he could have told the story well. This cannot be doubted if a look is taken at the pencil and pen memoranda that are to be found in his copy of Forster's "Life"--the three-volume edition of 1872, which will be sold on Monday (3).

The marginal notes reveal not only Collins 's feelings about Dickens's works and life, but also about the shortcomings of Forster 's biography itself. Forster, asserts Collins, is too inclined to conventional morality ("wretched English claptrap") and to eulogize Dickens. In criticizing Forster's praising his dead friend's "unbroken continuity of kindly impulse," Collins seems to imply that there was a dimension of Dickens's life that Forster was reluctant to discuss. The best Dickens biography, then, in Collins's terms would be the one that best conveys that sense of the dual nature of Dickens, whose life in some respects is a more extraordinary bildungsroman (containing more plot secrets) than any of those which sprang from his pen. Collins seems to have been demanding from a Dickens biography a critical honesty and a strength of literary judgment that Forster's (even though, until the appearance of Edgar Johnson's Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph in 1952, it remained the standard work on Dickens' life) sometimes lacks.

Although many biographers have attempted Dickens since Collins pencilled in his criticisms of Forster, two recent scalers of that English literary edifice are particularly noteworthy: American Dickens scholar Fred Kaplan, and British novelist Peter Ackroyd. Against these moderns who have been influenced alike by Freud , television, and The National Enquirer , one employs the standards set by Dickens' friend, agent, and confidant, John Forster. Forster's biography is an epic in twelve books, an illustrated history (the first volume has thirteen illustrations, the second sixteen), a eulogy (it closes with a picture of Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner and the inscription on Dickens' grave), and an Horatio Alger story (its last word being in the appendixed will "�93,000" (II: 301). Forster was not merely the friend of the great man; he was a highly experienced journalist by the time he began to write the biography, and his experience as a writer as well as his breadth of reading shows. For example, Forster compares CD's childhood first to Sir Walter Scott's, then to David Copperfield's in "Earliest Years." The work is full of literary references, including the books CD read as a child. In the second chapter, "Hard Experiences in Boyhood. 1822-1824," Forster relates CD's experience in the blacking warehouse 'somewhere near the Strand' to David Copperfield's. He was, in fact, the first to mention the connection, which he stumbled upon quite by accident in conversation with Dickens "in the March or April of 1847" (I: 15). From the third chapter, "School Days and Start in Life," Forster proceeds to the period 1831-35, when Dickens began his career as a writer at the age of nineteen, becoming a short-hand reporter covering parliamentary debates for the True Sun .

The second great biography of Charles Dickens is that of American scholar and novelist Edgar Johnson, published in two volumes in 1952, then revised and abridged in 1977. Whereas Forster was content to anecdotalize and quote his friend, Johnson narrates with considerable sympathy Dickens' life as though it were a novel. Like Forster in the two-volume edition, Edgar Johnson in Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (1952) sees the year 1846 as the natural division between the earlier and later stages of the author's career and life. The two parts of the later biography, taken together, total 1158 pages of text, plus eight pages of genealogical charts, fifty pages of notes, a 16-page bibliography, and an extensive (80-page) index. Johnson's thoroughness is undermined only slightly by the fact that one must wade through 16 pages of illustrations at the start of the second volume before one encounters "Part Seven: At Grips with Himself, 1846-1853."

Johnson's point of attack is novel, for he begins not with Dickens' birth but with the rambling, old Georgian mansion still called Gad's Hill Place. This is both Dickens's destination as a mature Victorian pater familias and a symbol of his artistic and financial success. Halting at page 10, towards the end of Dickens' second year on earth, one is brought to a halt by 16 pages of illustrations, cramped three to a five by seven and a half-inch page. Then the narrative continues with Dickens' childhood in Rochester ("The Happy Time"), followed by the contrasting recounting of his time at Warren's Blacking , Hungerford Stairs, in "The Challenge of Despair," and assessing the impact which that five-month period (coinciding with the time that his father spent in the Marshalsea for debt) had upon his childish soul. Dickens as office boy, as reporter, a youth in love with the banker's daughter, and finally as writer, begins in the fourth chapter, "Ambition's Ladder." From birth to age fifteen has taken us just 46 pages.

A touchstone to both the biographer's and biography's biases is the handling of Dickens' first American visit (1841-442). Forster devotes an entire 'book' (seven chapters) to this topic, quoting extensively from the letters that Dickens directed to him (and later borrowed back in order to write American Notes). Dickens' stand on the copyright question Forster presents through quoting a number of letters, especially that of 24 February, in which CD comments upon how Americans are reacting to his oft-publically-stated position and reminders of the melancholy fate of Scott, whose life would have been both happier and longer had he been able to enjoy royalties from sales of his works in the United States. Johnson, too, feels that the first American tour marks an important stage in Dickens' life: he devotes all of the fifth 'part' (five chapters totalling 89 pages) to the subject, his titles signalling the novelist's gradual disillusionment with the great experiment in democracy and a classless society: "The American Dream," "Conquest With Undertones," "'Not the Republic of My Imagination'," "Return Journey," and "Home Again: Valedictory on America."

"Remember vot I says, Boz-- You're going to cross the sea; A blessed vay avay, Boz, To vild Amerikey; A blessed set of savages, As books of travels tells; No guv'ner's eye to vatch, Boz, Nor even Samivel's.

"Just think of all of yours, Boz, Devoured by them already; Avoid their greedy lures, Boz, Their appetites is steady; For years they've been a feastin', Boz, Nor paid for their repast; And von't they make a blessed feast Ven they catches you at last!" (377)

a wish to pin down this chameleon that prompted Ackroyd to include several fanciful inter-chapters where a Dickens figure converses with his own characters, or with Oscar Wilde, T. S. Eliot, and others. The trouble is that the imagined Dickens seems so much thinner than the biographical one (8: 1).

A young woman came running out from the dilapidated shop . . . ; Dickens stepped aside and let her pass, but looked at her so sharply that she felt the brightness of his glance upon her. She looked up at him as she ran off. "Did you see that face? I have never seen anything like it before! Truly, never!" But his questioner had seen only the startled appearance of a young woman caught by Dickens, as it were, while in pursuit of her own life. "What a fate she will have!" He murmured this with some satisfaction (307).

Aside from such critical playfulness, Ackroyd's strength lies partly in the wealth of detail he offers. For example, whereas Kaplan notes only Dickens's support of the 1836 Copyright Bill in his index, Ackroyd provides five entries under "copyright." Ackroyd has read widely enough and researched thoroughly enough that he can, for example, be fair-minded in his assessment of Dickens' position on copyright, taking into account both how important "monetary fair play" (351) was to the British author and how the Americans' "economic depression [should be viewed] as a hindrance to the export of American funds" that the sending of royalties abroad would have entailed. Kaplan reveals his national biases when he argues that Dickens' sense of personal, moral injury prevented him from attaining "a temperate and larger perspective" which would give him a "sense of the economic reality or of American irritability on such matters" (128). Kaplan offers as an antidote to Dickens's fulminations the Americans' economic justification for piracy: "undercapitalized nations, without public libraries, needed inexpensive access to ideas and entertainment that they could not generate themselves or afford to purchase at high rates" (127).

Another example of Ackroyd's detail is his interest in the breakup of Dickens's marriage and his relationship with Ellen Lawless Ternan. Only in the appendixed will does Forster, proper Victorian and friend of the Dickens family, mention the young actress whom Kaplan describes as the "catalyst" (410) rather than the cause of the separation. Forster, conceding only that Dickens's conduct with respect to Catherine serves as an "illustration of grave defects" (II: 147) in his character, clearly wishes to avoid the whole topic of the breakdown in the marriage. "Thenceforward," concludes Forster, "he and his wife lived apart." Johnson is less discrete, naming Ellen Ternan as Dickens's mistress and providing 27 references to her, including her presence in the railway carriage with Dickens during the Staplehurst accident in June, 1865. Whereas Johnson refuses to speculate about the liaison, offering documented evidence instead of conjecture, in his 81 references to her Ackroyd displays an intense fascination with the Ternan affair that goes far beyond Kaplan's romantic but reasonably factual 43. Although as Spurling suggests, "Kaplan has painstakingly reconstructed Mrs. Dickens's story from external evidence" (XI), he eschews speculation about where and how the novelist and the actress conducted their relationship. Kaplan's sympathy for Catherine and reluctance to speculate about Dickens's relationship with Miss Ternan result in his merely alluding to "the misdelivered-necklace incident" (386). Ackroyd with the determination of a modern investigative reporter works through the various versions of this story, in which a bracelet or "a brooch which contained . . . [Dickens'] portrait or his initials" (808) was somehow sent to Catherine by the jeweller. Ackroyd concludes that the many versions are merely a piece of the confusions, hearsay, and rumours about the separation of the Dickenses that were in circulation in 1858. Very much a literary detective, Ackroyd also tracks Ellen's residences carefully, noting for example that in Slough Dickens lived near the Ternans under the alias Charles or John Tringham.

Although Forster had mentioned both the Staplehurst railway accident and its long-term effects on Dickens' psyche (II: 209-210, 179), he had made it neither the vivid, powerfully-moving tale it becomes under Johnson's hands, nor the dramatic moment it is in Kaplan, nor the illustration of Dickens's personal heroism that Ackroyd makes it. Unlike previous biographers, Ackroyd explains what caused the derailment (the foreman in charge of a works crew had both misread a timetable and posted his flagman too close to the work-site) and provides some highly pertinent details about the fatal wreck of the 2:38 tidal train from Folkestone , on which Dickens was riding in the same compartment as Ellen and Mrs. Ternan (not merely a nameless "old lady" as in Johnson, p. 1019). Providing some of the same details as Johnson, Kaplan adds the final speed of the locomotive and assigns Mrs. Ternan a part in the scene; however, not surprisingly it is Ackroyd who provides the most factually- convincing and most detailed account:

The train approached the broken line at a speed of between twenty and thirty miles per hour [having been travelling at fifty m. p. h. when the engineer saw the flagman], jumped the gap of forty-two feet, and swerved off the track as the central and rear carriages fell below. All of the seven first-class carriages plummeted downwards--except one and that one, held by its couplings onto the second-class carriage in front, was occupied by Charles Dickens and the Ternans (959).

Although it sometimes lacks such detail, Kaplan's biography has the great merit of readability: one will neither fall asleep nor hurl down the volume in frustration. Examples of Kaplan's ability to recount a story in a manner that generates reader interest are his narrations of the Staplehurst accident and of Dickens' ascent of Mount Vesuvius. His re-telling of the accident is vigorous and moving, filled with a sense of movement and action, and made all the more immediate and vivid through snatches of dialogue. Twenty years earlier, on the night of 21 January 1845, despite the screams of his courier, Roche, "that they would be killed" (186), Dickens had flung himself into as grave a danger, pressing the party's head guide to conduct him to the very brink of the inferno. The descent was not without incident: "the head guide staggered, slipped, and plunged head first," landing on the ice-covered rocks 500 feet below, and another of the 22 guides "stumbled and rolled down past . . . [Dickens, Georgina, and Catherine], shrieking in pain and terror" (186).

Being a thorough Dickens scholar (he is editor of Dickens Studies Annual ), Kaplan connects Dickens' experience at Vesuvius to that at Niagara Falls in April, 1842. His recounting of Dickens' death, for example, is moving, but Kaplan underplays Ellen's presence, and mentions only that the novelist's dying words were, "'Yes, on the ground'" (354). Ackroyd, in preparation for writing the biography having read three times over anything Dickens ever wrote, is the only biographer of Dickens to make the connection between those words and his novels:

His last words. And is it possible that he had in some bewildered way echoed the words of Louisa Gradgrind to her errant father in Hard Times , "I shall die if you hold me! Let me fall upon the ground!'"? And were his other characters around him as he lay unconscious through his last night? . . . . And can we see them now, the ghosts of Dickens's imagination, hovering around him as he approaches his own death? (1078)

Ackroyd's subsequent epic catalogue of some fifty characters seems out of place, an unwarranted intrusion, a rhetorical trick unworthy of the moment. Had Ackroyd stopped with "Charles Dickens had left the world" (1079), the reader might have felt moved by the final sob and the tear that, as in Kaplan and Johnson, "rose to his right eye and trickled down his cheek." Dickens should properly be the focal point of his own demise. However, Ackroyd robs this, the ultimate climax of any life, of its dramatic impact by moving on to a "Postscript" which ends with Mamie's saying goodbye to every room at Gadshill, and Catherine's breaking down three years later at a London performance of an adaptation of Dombey and Son .

In contrast, Forster's account of Dickens' last moments is terse and clinical:

There was effusion on the brain; and though stertorous breathing continued all night, and until ten minutes past six o'clock on the evening of Thursday the 9th of June, there had never been a gleam of hope during the twenty-four hours. He had lived four months beyond his 58th year (II: 296).

Forster's discussion of the funeral rises to a peroration as he quotes Westminster's Dean Stanley's pronouncement that the place of Dickens' burial "would thenceforward be a sacred one with both the New World and the Old, as that of the representative of the literature, not of this island only, but of all who speak our English tongue" (II: 297-8). However, Forster spoils both the effect and the image of Dickens' grave in Poets' Corner by mentioning Richard Cumberland's, Mrs. Pritchard's, and David Garrick's graves nearby as evoking "The highest associations of both the arts he [Dickens] loved" (II: 298). Forster redeems himself in his final sentence:

Facing the grave, and on its left and right, are the monuments of CHAUCER, SHAKESPEARE, and DRYDEN, the three immortals who did most to create and settle the language to which CHARLES DICKENS has given another undying name (II: 298).

Johnson cannot match Forster's power and solemnity, but he exceeds his predecessor in detail, movement, and freshness, quoting the elegy given in Punch --

"He sleeps as he should sleep -- among the great In the old Abbey: sleeps amid the few Of England's famous thousands whose high state Is to lie with her monarchs — monarchs too" (II: 1157)--

and places Dickens' resting place at the foot of Handel's and by the side of Macaulay 's, attended by "the busts of Milton and Spenser and the monuments of Dryden, Chaucer, and Shakespeare" (II: 1157). To Johnson as to the well-informed and imaginative reader these names connote the highest reaches of music, history, satire, comedy, humanity, and tragedy; they sum up the nature of the literary achievement of Charles John Huffam Dickens.

Kaplan closes with the matter-of-fact detail that, when Dean Stanley asked Forster's permission to leave the grave unsealed for the remainder of the day that the nation might pay their greatest novelist his due, the dead man's executor replied, "'Yes; now my work is over, and you may do what you like'" (556). The line is one which Kaplan exploits for a second meaning by virtue of its being the last line of his text. It is, perhaps, a fitting exodus or anti-masque, but those who would rather think of Dickens still very much alive in his creations will likely prefer Johnson's closing to all the rest:

More than eighty years have passed since Charles Dickens died. His passionate heart has long crumbled to dust. But the world he created shines with undying life, and the hearts of men still vibrate to his indignant anger, his love, his tears, his glorious laughter, and his triumphant faith in the dignity of man (II: 1158).

Those are the noblest, most affecting, and most truthful words ever written about Dickens, even though in some measure Johnson's biography falls short of the rhetoric of Forster, the charm of Kaplan, and the originality and thoroughness of Ackroyd.

Although, as the Pall Mall Gazette for 20 January 1890 observes of Collins's critical powers, "His estimates of some of Dickens's stories are terse, direct, and vigorous" (3), in the later years of Dickens' life there was not that closeness between Collins, the successful writer of thrillers, and his former mentor that the pair had enjoyed in Collins' youth. As Hesketh Pearson notes,

knowing that Forster had every intention of writing his biography, [Dickens] maintained their relationship as best he could and dared not nominate anyone else as his executor, even if there had been anyone else equally trustworthy, equally capable, equally authoritative, equally well informed.

Wilkie Collins, had he been willing to act in that capacity, was not the man for the job; and apart from the absence of his name from the will, there is evidence that Dickens was cooling towards him in the last years. They were seldom together; their correspondence almost ceased. . . (344).

Even though Collins "had no successor in the confidence of Dickens" (Pearson 344), Forster continued to work closely with Dickens right to the end, the novelist reading each number of The Mystery of Edwin Drood , for example, before sending it to the printer. Even the anonymous writer of the Pall Mall Gazette article, speculating about the possibility of a Dickens biography by Collins, does not suppress the younger novelist's final note on Forster: "The assertion (quite sincerely made) that no letters addressed by Dickens to other old friends revealed his character so frankly and completely as his letters to Forster, it is not necessary to contradict" (3). Perhaps in these lines, inscribed on page 442 of Collins's copy of Forster's Life is the clue as to why Collins did not attempt the subject himself, despite his warm relationship with the 'Great Inimitable' in the 1850s. Forster's knowledge of Dickens throughout his career, from the days of Pickwick and Chuzzlewit when CD aspired to the title of "The Fielding of the Nineteenth Century" to his experimentation with the new psychological style pioneered by Collins himself, was simply greater than that of any other Dickens contemporary. Thus, no matter what biographies of Dickens will be written in later times, the font of biographical Dickens will continue to be Forster's three-volume Life .

Selected List of References

Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens: A Biography . London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990.

Carey, John. "Paper Tiger" [Review of Ackroyd's Dickens ]. The Sunday Times [London] (2 September 1990): Sec. 8, p. 1.

Fadiman, Clifton. " Dickens: A Biography by Peter Ackroyd." BookNews (Book-of-the- Month Club) April 1991: 2-3.

Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens . London: Chapman and Hall, n. d. 2 vols. [Originally published in 3 vols., 1872-4.]

Johnson, Edgar. Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph . 2 vols. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952; 1 vol., revised and abridged, New York: Viking, 1977.

Kaplan, Fred. Dickens: A Biography . New York: William Morrow, 1988.

Pearson,Hesketh. Dickens: His Character, Comedy and Career . London: Cassell, 1949.

Spurling, Hilary. "Driven by Furies" [review of Kaplan's Dickens: Biography ]. Weekend Telegraph [London] (19 November 1988): XI.

"Wilkie Collins About Charles Dickens." The Pall Mall Gazette 10 January 1890: 3.

Created 4 November 2000 Last modified 20 February 2024

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The Mystery of Charles Dickens has been named the best biography of the year.

At this weekend’s annual conference of Biographers International Organization, A.N. Wilson’s The Mystery of Charles Dickens (HarperCollins) was awarded the BIO Plutarch Award—an award celebrating the best biography of the last year published in English, as chosen from nominations received by publishers and BIO members.

The Mystery of Charles Dickens was chosen from five other finalists: Les Payne and Tamara Payne’s The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X ; Jonathan Alter’s His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life ; Ted Widmer’s Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington ; and Martha Ackmann’s These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson . Said Kate Buford, chair of the Plutarch Committee, “During an unprecedented year marked by political upheavals, the COVID pandemic and many publishing challenges, we were struck by the compelling humanity and deft artistry of Wilson’s biography. It is a biographer’s biography.”

A Special Citation was given to Eddie S. Glaude Jr’s Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own , in recognition of “its summoning of Baldwin’s penetrating voice and eyes that remind us of the post-Civil War and post-civil rights betrayals of racial justice.”

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ARTS & CULTURE

The essentials: charles dickens.

What are the must-read books written by and about the famed British author?

Megan Gambino

Senior Editor

One of the most-read authors of the Victorian era, Charles Dickens wrote over a dozen novels in his career, as well as short stories, plays and nonfiction. He is probably best known for his memorable cast of characters, including Ebenezer Scrooge, Oliver Twist and David Copperfield.

Becoming Dickens , a biography released in 2011 in time for the 200th anniversary of his birth, chronicles the writer’s meteoric rise from relative obscurity as a journalist to one of England’s most adored novelists. Here, the book’s author, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, recommends five novels by Dickens and five additional books that offer insight into the writer and his work.

The Pickwick Papers (1836)

In Charles Dickens’ first novel, The Pickwick Papers , Samuel Pickwick, the founder of the Pickwick Club in London, and three of the group’s members—Nathaniel Winkle, Augustus Snodgrass and Tracy Tupman—travel around the English countryside. Sam Weller, a cockney who speaks in proverbs, joins the party as Mr. Pickwick’s assistant, adding more comedy to their adventures, which include romances, hunting outings, a costume party and jail stays.

From Douglas-Fairhurst: This started out as a collection of monthly comic sketches and only slowly developed into something more like a novel. A huge craze at the time of its original publication in 1836-37—it produced as many commercial spinoffs as any modern film—it still has the power to reduce a reader to tears of laughter. As a comic double-act, Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller are as immortal as Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello.

Oliver Twist (1837-39)

When orphan Oliver Twist loses a bet and brazenly asks for more gruel, he is kicked out of his workhouse and sent to serve as an apprentice to an undertaker. On the run after a scuffle with another of the undertaker’s apprentices, Oliver Twist meets Jack Dawkins, or the Artful Dodger, who brings him into a gang of pickpockets trained by a criminal named Fagin.

From Douglas-Fairhurst: “Please, sir, I want some more”—When Dickens wrote that at the start of his first fully planned novel, he was probably hoping that the sentiment would be echoed by his readers. He wasn’t disappointed. His waif-like hero may be a little passive for modern tastes, but Oliver’s adventures with Fagin and the Artful Dodger quickly passed from fiction into folklore. There may be fewer jokes than in The Pickwick Papers , but Dickens’ satire on attitudes toward poverty remains as relevant as ever.

A Christmas Carol (1843)

Ebenezer Scrooge’s deceased business partner Jacob Marley and three other spirits—the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come—visit him in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol . The spirits tour Scrooge through scenes of past and present holidays. He even gets a preview of what is in store for him should he continue on his miserly ways. Scared straight, he wakes from the dream a new man, joyful and benevolent.

From Douglas-Fairhurst: This isn’t a novel, strictly speaking, but it is still one of the most influential stories ever written. Since A Christmas Carol ’s first appearance in 1843, it has been reproduced in so many different forms, from Marcel Marceau to the Muppets, that it is now as much a part of Christmas as turkey or presents, while words like “Scrooge” are deeply rooted in the national psyche. At once funny and touching, it has become one of our most powerful modern myths.

Great Expectations (1860-61)

This is the story of Pip, an orphan who has eyes for Estrella, a girl of a higher class. He receives a fortune from Magwitch, a fugitive he once provided food for, and puts the money toward his education so that he might gain Estrella’s favor. Does he win over the girl? I won’t spoil the ending.

From Douglas-Fairhurst: A slim novel that punches well above its weight, Great Expectations is a fable about the corrupting power of money, and the redeeming power of love, that has never lost its grip on the public imagination. It is also beautifully constructed. If some of Dickens’ novels sprawl luxuriously across the page, this one is as trim as a whippet. Touch any part of it and the whole structure quivers into life. 

Bleak House  (1852-53)

Dickens’ ninth novel,  Bleak House , centers around  Jarndyce and Jarndyce , a drawn-out case in England’s Court of Chancery involving one person who drew up several last wills with contradicting terms. The story follows the characters tied up in the case, many of whom are listed as beneficiaries.

From Douglas-Fairhurst:  Each of Dickens’ major novels has its admirers, but few can match  Bleak House  for its range and verve. It is at once a remarkable verbal photograph of mid-Victorian life and a narrative experiment that anticipates much modern fiction. Some of its scenes, such as the death of Jo, the crossing sweeper, tread a fine line between pathos and melodrama, but they have a raw power that was never equaled even by Dickens himself.

The Life of Charles Dickens  (1872-74), by John Forster

Soon after Dickens died from a stroke in 1870, John Forster, his friend and editor for more than 30 years, gathered letters, documents and memories and wrote his first biography.

From Douglas-Fairhurst:  The result was patchy, pompous and sometimes reads more like a disguised autobiography. One reviewer sniffed that it “should not be called  The Life of Dickens , but the  History of Dickens’ Relations to Mr. Forster .” But it also contained some remarkable revelations, including the fragment of autobiography in which Dickens first told the truth about his miserable childhood. It is the foundation stone for all later biography.

Charles Dickens: A Critical Study  (1906), by G. K. Chesterton

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, an English writer in the early 20th century, devoted whole chapters of his study of Dickens to the novelist’s youth, his characters, his debut novel  The Pickwick Papers , America and Christmas, among other topics.

From Douglas-Fairhurst:  If Dickens invented the modern celebration of Christmas, Chesterton almost single-handedly invented the modern celebration of Dickens. What he relishes above all in Dickens’ writing is its joyful prodigality, and his own book comes close to matching Dickens in its energy and good humor. There have been many hundreds of books on Dickens written since Chesterton’s, but few are as lively or significant. Almost every sentence is a quotable gem.

The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens’ Imagination  (1973, rev. ed. 2008), by John Carey

When the University of Oxford expanded its English curriculum to include literature written after the 1830s, professor and literary critic John Carey began to deliver lectures on Charles Dickens. These lectures eventually turned into a book,  The Violent Effigy , which attempts to guide readers, unpretentiously, through Dickens’ fertile imagination.

From Douglas-Fairhurst:  This brilliantly iconoclastic study starts from the premise that “we could scrap all the solemn parts of Dickens’ novels without impairing his status as a writer,” and sets out to celebrate the strange poetry of his imagination instead. Rather than a solemn treatise on Dickens’ symbolism, we are reminded of his obsession with masks and wooden legs; rather than viewing Dickens as a serious social critic, we are presented with a showman and comedian who “did not want to provoke … reform so much as to retain a large and lucrative audience.” It is the funniest book on Dickens ever written.

Dickens   (1990), by Peter Ackroyd

This tome of 1,000-plus pages by Peter Ackroyd, a biographer who has also made Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot his subjects, captures the nonfiction—or life and times of Charles Dickens—that the writer often wove into his fiction.

From Douglas-Fairhurst:  When Peter Ackroyd’s huge biography of Dickens was first published, it was attacked by some reviewers for what they saw as its self-indulgent postmodern tricks, including fictional dialogues in which Ackroyd conversed with his subject. Yet such passages are central to a book in which Ackroyd involves himself sympathetically in every aspect of Dickens’ life. As a result, you finish this book feeling not just that you know more about Dickens, but that you actually know him. A biography that rivals Dickens’ novels for its rich cast of characters, sprawling plot and unpredictable swerves between realism and romance.

Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit   (1999), by John Bowen

John Bowen, now a professor of 19th-century literature at England’s University of York, casts his eye toward Dickens’ early works, written from 1836 to 1844. He argues that novels such as  The Pickwick Papers ,  Oliver Twist  and  Martin Chuzzlewit  redefined fiction in the way that they broach politics and comedy.

From Douglas-Fairhurst:   During Dickens’ lifetime they were by far his most popular works, and it was only in the 20th century that readers developed a preference for the later, darker novels. John Bowen’s study shows why we should return to them, and what they look like when viewed through modern critical eyes. It is a superbly readable and detailed piece of literary detective work.

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Megan Gambino is a senior web editor for Smithsonian magazine.

11 of the best Charles Dickens books (for every type of reader)

One of england’s best-loved authors, charles dickens was a prolific writer. if you’re unsure where to start with his many novels, travel books and short stories, here’s our guide to the best charles dickens’ books for every type of reader. .

Charles Dickens'  books are an important part of our literary heritage, and Dickens is one of the most beloved English writers of all time. remembered as one of the great chroniclers of Victorian life, his brilliant wit and rich narratives brought him incomparable fame in the literary world, both in his own time and in ours. 

From the well-known A Tale of Two Cities to the tale of Oliver Twist , Charles Dickens’ era-defining novels explore social concerns like labour conditions, poverty and childhood cruelty while keeping love, friendship and sorrow at their hearts. If you're not sure where to start, we're here to help with this guide to the best Charles Dickens book for every type of reader. 

The best Charles Dickens novel for crime fiction fans

Bleak house, by charles dickens.

Part tightly plotted murder mystery, part biting condemnation of the corruption at the heart of English society, Bleak House follows the inheritance case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The case has been drawn out for generations, and we’re introduced to myriad characters from all walks of life. There’s Esther Summerson, Dickens' feisty heroine; Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock, cocooned in their stately home in Lincolnshire; and Jo, the penniless crossing sweeper. With murder, secrets and spies, if your go-to genre is crime fiction , then this Charles Dickens book is the one for you.

‘ Bleak House is his greatest novel . . . with its backdrop of a legal system more invested in obstruction and obfuscation than resolution, it remains utterly contemporary ’ Anna Quindlen, Independent

The best Charles Dickens book for younger readers

Oliver twist.

When orphaned Oliver Twist runs away from the workhouse he was born in and arrives by foot in London, he’s faced with a world of crime, unusual friends and unexpected kindness. Centred around the lives of Victorian children, Oliver Twist is part pleasure, part education and the perfect book to get children into Dickens.

Charles Dickens' most romantic book

Great expectations.

Also opening with a poor orphaned boy, Great Expectations tells the tale of how young Pip falls in love with a beautiful upper-class girl named Estella. Will class division get in the way of his heart? If you’re a romantic, this heartwarming, plot-twisting and captivating novel is the perfect Dickens novel to start with.

Charles Dickens' books that explore politics

Set in Coketown, an imaginary town inspired by Preston, Hard Times is a novel of social and moral themes which George Bernard Shaw called a ‘passionate revolt against the whole industrial order of the modern world.’ A savage satire of the social and economic conditions of the time, it addresses the trade union movement and post-Industrial Revolution inequality. 

A Tale of Two Cities

Set against the backdrop of the French revolution, A Tale of Two Cities is the best place to start for a tense political novel. Dr Manette is finally reunited with his daughter Lucie after eighteen years of wrongful imprisonment in the Bastille. But when Lucie falls in love with Charles Darney, who’s accused of treason against the English crown, their family equilibrium is once again thrust into danger in this tightly plotted story of revenge and sacrifice.

The funniest Charles Dickens novel

The pickwick papers.

Mr. Pickwick, Tracy Tupman, Augustus Snodgrass and Nathaniel Winckle are an unlikely band of travellers drawn together in the Pickwick Club of London. They journey around England befriending everyone from country squires to local literary giants in this hilarious and sentimental novel. The Pickwick Papers is the perfect, witty novel to get you into Dickens.

The scariest Charles Dickens novel

Ghost stories.

Dickens began the tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas, but his frightening and fascinating tales aren’t confined to the festive season. From gruesome legal drama ‘A Trial for Murder’, to eerie domestic farce ‘The Ghost in the Bride’s Chamber’, you are guaranteed a fright in Dicken’s Ghost Stories .

The best Charles Dickens book if you like to read autobiographies

David copperfield.

Although David Copperfield is a novel, it was partly based on Charles Dickens’s own life and he described it as the favourite of his novels. The book tells the life story of David Copperfield, from his birth in Suffolk, through the various struggles of his childhood, to his successful career as a novelist. The novel’s outlandish cast of characters, which includes the glamorous Steerforth, the cheerful, verbose Mr Micawber, the villainous Uriah Heep, and David's eccentric aunt, Betsey Trotwood, make it a joy to read.

A Charles Dickens novel that will transport you back in time

Scenes of london life.

Scenes of London Life offers a genuine window into Victorian London through satirical short stories that take you from the colourful chaos of gin-shops to the destitution of pawnshops. If you want to be transported to another place, Scenes of London Life is an accessible way in.

The best Charles Dickens book to read at Christmas

A christmas carol.

An obvious choice perhaps, but Charles Dickens' beloved novella is a festive staple and the perfect Christmas read. A celebration of Christmas, a tale of redemption, and a critique of Victorian society, it follows the miserly, penny-pinching Ebenezer Scrooge who views Christmas as 'humbug'. It is only through a series of eerie, life-changing visits from the ghost of his deceased business partner Marley and the spirits of Christmas past, present and future that Scrooge begins to see the error of his ways.

If you only read one Charles Dickens book

Our mutual friend.

Often described as one of Dickens’ most sophisticated works, Our Mutual Friend was named one of the BBC’s Novels That Shaped Our World . The novel was the last that Dickens completed, and is a savage indictment of the corrupting power of money.  When John Harmon dies and his estranged son is also presumed dead, his riches pass to his servants Mr and Mrs Boffin. They hire a young man to be Mr Boffin’s secretary, but what is this secretive man’s true identity? 

‘ I find it irresistible: the autumn evening closing in, the crazy little boat afloat on the filthy Thames, the strong young woman plying the oars and a ragged, grizzled man, her father, busying himself with something towed in the water behind them. You are some way into the narrative before it dawns on you that it is a drowned body. ’ Shirley Hughes, Independent

In this episode of Book Break Emma explores the English seaside, including Broadstairs where Charles Dickens stayed while writing  Nicholas Nickelby  and where the Charles Dickens Museum can now be found:

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Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was a British author who penned the beloved classics Oliver Twist , A Christmas Carol , David Copperfield , and Great Expectations .

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Who Was Charles Dickens?

Charles Dickens was a British author, journalist, editor, illustrator, and social commentator who wrote the beloved classics Oliver Twist , A Christmas Carol , and Great Expectations . His books were first published in monthly serial installments, which became a lucrative source of income following a childhood of abject poverty. Dickens wrote 15 novels in total, including Nicholas Nickleby , David Copperfield , and A Tale of Two Cities . His writing provided a stark portrait of poor and working class people in the Victorian era that helped to bring about social change. Dickens died in June 1870 at age 58 and is remembered as one of the most important and influential writers of the 19 th century.

Quick Facts

Early life and education, life as a journalist, editor, and illustrator, personal life: wife and children, charles dickens’ books: 'oliver twist,' 'great expectations,' and more, travels to the united states, 'a christmas carol' and other works, pop culture adaptations.

FULL NAME: Charles John Huffam Dickens BORN: February 7, 1812 DIED: June 9, 1870 BIRTHPLACE: Portsmouth, England SPOUSE: Catherine Thomson Hogarth (1836-1870) CHILDREN: Charles Jr., Mary, Kate, Walter, Francis, Alfred, Sydney, Henry, Dora, and Edward ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Aquarius

Charles John Huffam Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth on the southern coast of England. He was the second of eight children born to John Dickens, a naval clerk who dreamed of striking it rich, and Elizabeth Barrow, who aspired to be a teacher and school director. Despite his parents’ best efforts, the family remained poor but nevertheless happy in the early days.

In 1816, they moved to Chatham, Kent, where young Dickens and his siblings were free to roam the countryside and explore the old castle at Rochester. Dickens was a sickly child and prone to spasms, which prevented him from playing sports. He compensated by reading avidly, including such books as Robinson Crusoe, Tom Jones , Peregrine Pickle , and The Arabian Nights , according to The World of Charles Dickens by Fido Martin.

In 1822, the Dickens family moved to Camden Town, a poor neighborhood in London. By then, the family’s financial situation had grown dire, as Charles’ father had a dangerous habit of living beyond the family’s means. Eventually, John was sent to prison for debt in 1824, when Charles was just 12 years old. He boarded with a sympathetic family friend named Elizabeth Roylance, who later inspired the character Mrs. Pipchin in Dickens’ 1847 novel Dombey and Son , according to Dickens: A Biography by Fred Kaplan.

Following his father’s imprisonment, Dickens was forced to leave school to work at a boot-blacking factory alongside the River Thames. At the run-down, rodent-ridden factory, Dickens earned 6 shillings a week labeling pots of “blacking,” a substance used to clean fireplaces. It was the best he could do to help support his family, and the strenuous working conditions heavily influenced his future writing and his views on treatment of the poor and working class.

Much to his relief, Dickens was permitted to go back to school when his father received a family inheritance and used it to pay off his debts. He attended the Wellington House Academy in Camden Town, where he encountered what he called “haphazard, desultory teaching [and] poor discipline,” according to The World of Charles Dickens by Angus Wilson. The school’s sadistic headmaster was later the inspiration for the character Mr. Creakle in Dickens’ semi-autobiographical novel David Copperfield .

When Dickens was 15, his education was pulled out from under him once again. In 1827, he had to drop out of school and work as an office boy to contribute to his family’s income. However, as it turned out, the job became a launching point for his writing career. Within a year of being hired, Dickens began freelance reporting at the law courts of London. Just a few years later, he was reporting for two major London newspapers.

In 1833, he began submitting sketches to various magazines and newspapers under the pseudonym “Boz,” which was a family nickname. His first published story was “A Dinner at Poplar Walk,” which ran in London’s Monthly Magazine in 1833. Seeing his writing in print made his eyes “overflow with joy and pride,” according to Dickens: A Biography . In 1836, his clippings were published in his first book, Sketches by Boz.

Dickens later edited magazines including Household Words and All the Year Round , the latter of which he founded. In both, he promoted and originally published some of his own work such as Oliver Twist and A Tale of Two Cities .

Dickens married Catherine Hogarth in 1836, soon after the publication of his first book, Sketches by Boz . She was the daughter of George Hogarth, the editor of the Evening Chronicle . Dickens and Hogarth went on to have 10 children between 1837 and 1852, according to biographer Fred Kaplan. Among them were magazine editor Charles Dickens Jr., painter Kate Dickens Perugini, barrister Henry Fielding Dickens, and Edward Dickens, who entered into politics after immigrating to the Australia.

In 1851, Dickens suffered two devastating losses: the deaths of his infant daughter, Dora, and his father, John. He also separated from his wife in 1858. Dickens slandered Catherine publicly and struck up an intimate relationship with a young actor named Ellen “Nelly” Ternan. Sources differ on whether the two started seeing each other before or after Dickens’ marital separation. It is also believed that he went to great lengths to erase any documentation alluding to Ternan’s presence in his life. These major losses and challenges seeped into Dickens’ writing in his “dark novel” period.

Best known for his fiction writing, Dickens wrote a total of 15 novels between 1836 and 1870. His first was The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club , and his last was The Mystery of Edwin Drood , which went unfinished due to his death.

Dickens’ books were originally published in monthly serial installments that sold for 1 shilling each. The affordable price meant everyday citizens could follow along, though wealthier readers, such as Queen Victoria , were also among Dickens’ fans. Once complete, the stories were published again in novel form.

Dickens’ books provided a stark portrait of poor and working class people in the Victorian era that helped to bring about social change. In the 1850s, following the death of his father and infant daughter, as well as his separation from his wife, Dickens’ novels began to express a darkened worldview. His so-called dark novels are Bleak House (1853), Hard Times (1854), and Little Dorrit (1857). They feature more complicated, thematically grim plots and more complex characters, though Dickens didn’t stray from his typical societal commentary.

Read more about each of Charles Dickens’ novels below:

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Serial Publication: April 1836 to November 1837 Novel Publication: 1837

In 1836, the same year his first book of illustrations released, Dickens started publishing The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club . His series, originally written as captions for artist Robert Seymour’s humorous sports-themed illustrations, took the form of monthly serial installments. It was wildly popular with readers, and Dickens’ captions proved even more popular than the illustrations they were meant to accompany.

Oliver Twist

Serial Publication: February 1837 to March 1839 Novel Publication: November 1838

While still working on The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club , Dickens began Oliver Twist, or The Parish Boy’s Progress , which would prove to be one of his most popular novels. The book follows the life of an orphan living in the streets of London, where he must get by on his wits and falls in with a gang of juvenile pickpockets led by the dastardly Fagin.

Oliver Twist unromantically portrayed the mistreatment of London orphans, and the slums and poverty described in the novel made for biting social satire. Although very different from the humorous tone of the Pickwick Papers , Oliver Twist was extremely well-received in both England and America, and dedicated readers eagerly anticipated each next monthly installment, according to the biography Charles Dickens by Harold & Miriam Maltz. Even the young Queen Victoria was an avid reader of  Oliver Twist , describing it as “excessively interesting.”

Nicholas Nickleby

Serial Publication: April 1838 to October 1839 Novel Publication: 1839

As Dickens was still finishing Oliver Twist , he again began writing his follow-up work in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby . It tells the story of the title character, who must support his mother and sister following the loss of their comfortable lifestyle when his father dies and the family loses all of their money.

The Old Curiosity Shop

Serial Publication: April 1840 to February 1841 Novel Publication: 1841

Taking a few months between projects this time, Dickens’ next serial was The Old Curiosity Shop . Protagonist Nell Trent lives with her grandfather, whose gambling costs them the titular shop. The pair struggles to survive after into hiding to avoid a money lender.

Barnaby Rudge

Serial Publication: February to November 1841 Novel Publication: 1841

Right on the heels of The Old Curiosity Shop came Barnaby Rudge . The historical fiction novel, Dickens’ first, follows Barnaby and depicts the chaos of mob violence. The author originated the idea years prior but is thought to have temporarily abandoned it due to a dispute with his publisher.

Martin Chuzzlewit

Serial Publication: January 1843 to July 1844 Novel Publication: 1844

After his first American tour, Dickens wrote The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit . The story is about a man’s struggle to survive on the ruthless American frontier.

Dombey and Son

Serial Publication: October 1846 to April 1848 Novel Publication: 1848

After an uncharacteristic break, Dickens returned with Dombey and Son , which centers on the theme of how business tactics affect a family’s personal finances. Published as a novel in 1848, it takes a dark view of England and is considered pivotal to Dickens’ body of work in that it set the tone for his future novels.

David Copperfield

Serial Publication: May 1849 to November 1850 Novel Publication: November 1850

Dickens wrote his most autobiographical novel to date with David Copperfield by tapping into his own personal experiences in his difficult childhood and his work as a journalist. The book follows the life of its title character from his impoverished childhood to his maturity and success as a novelist. It was the first work of its kind: No one had ever written a novel that simply followed a character through his everyday life.

David Copperfield is considered one of Dickens’ masterpieces, and it was his personal favorite of his works; he wrote in the book’s preface, “Like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is David Copperfield.” It also helped define the public’s expectations of a Dickensian novel. In The Life of Charles Dickens , biographer John Forster wrote “Dickens never stood so high in reputation as at the completion of Copperfield ,” and biographer Fred Kaplan called the novel “an exploration of himself through his art more direct, more honest, more resolute than in his earlier fiction.”

Bleak House

Serial Publication: 1852 to 1853 Novel Publication: 1853

His next work, Bleak House , dealt with the hypocrisy of British society. The first of his “dark novels,” it was considered his most complex novel yet. Drawing upon his brief experiences as a law clerk and court reporter, the novel is built around a long-running legal case involving several conflicting wills and was described by biographer Fido Martin as “England’s greatest satire on the law’s incompetence and delays.” Dickens’ satire was so effective that it  helped support  a successful movement toward legal reform in the 1870s.

Serial Publication: April to August 1854 Novel Publication: 1854

Dickens followed Bleak House with Hard Times , which takes place in an industrial town at the peak of economic expansion. Hard Times focuses on the shortcomings of employers as well as those who seek change.

Little Dorrit

Serial Publication: December 1855 and June 1857 Novel Publication: 1857

Another novel from Dickens’ darker period is Little Dorrit , a fictional study of how human values conflict with the world’s brutality.

A Tale of Two Cities

Serial Publication: April to November 1959 Novel Publication: 1859

Coming out of his “dark novel” period, Dickens published A Tale of Two Cities in the periodical he founded, All the Year Round . The historical novel takes place during the French Revolution in Paris and London. Its themes focus on the need for sacrifice, the struggle between the evils inherent in oppression and revolution, and the possibility of resurrection and rebirth.

A Tale of Two Cities was a tremendous success and remains Dickens’ best-known work of historical fiction. Biographer Fido Martin called the novel “pure Dickens, but essentially a Dickens we have never seen before. This is a Dickens who has at last captured in prose fiction the stage heroics he adored.”

Great Expectations

Serial Publication: December 1860 to August 1861 Novel Publication: October 1861

Many people consider Great Expectations Dickens’ greatest literary accomplishment. The story—Dickens’ second that’s narrated in the first person—focuses on the lifelong journey of moral development for the novel’s protagonist, an orphan named Pip. With extreme imagery and colorful characters, the well-received novel touches on wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and good versus evil. The novel was a financial success and received nearly universal acclaim, with readers responding positively to the novel’s themes of love, morality, social mobility, and the eventual triumph of good over evil.

Our Mutual Friend

Serial Publication: May 1864 to November 1865 Novel Publication: 1865

In June 1865, Dickens was a passenger on a train that plunged off a bridge in Kent, according to biographer Fred Kaplan. He tended to the wounded and even saved the lives of some passengers before assistance arrived, and he was able to retrieve his unfinished manuscript for his next novel, Our Mutual Friend , from the wreckage. That book, a satire about wealth and the Victorian working class, wasn’t received as well as Dickens’ other works, with some finding the plot too complex and disorganized.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Serial Publication: April 1870 Novel Publication: 1870

Dickins’ final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood , began its monthly serialized publication in April 1870. However, Dickens died less than two months later, leaving the novel unfinished. Only six of a planned 12 installments of his final work were completed at the time of his death, according to biographer Fido Martin.

In 1842, Dickens and his wife, Catherine, embarked on a five-month lecture tour of the United States. Dickens spoke of his opposition to slavery and expressed his support for additional reform. His lectures, which began in Virginia and ended in Missouri, were so widely attended that ticket scalpers gathered outside his events. Biographer J.B. Priestley wrote that during the tour, Dickens enjoyed “the greatest welcome that probably any visitor to America has ever had.”

“They flock around me as if I were an idol,” bragged Dickens, a known show-off. Although he enjoyed the attention at first, he eventually resented the invasion of privacy. He was also annoyed by what he viewed as Americans’ gregariousness and crude habits, as he later expressed in American Notes for General Circulation (1842). The sarcastic travelogue, which Dickens’ penned upon his return to England, criticized American culture and materialism.

After his criticism of the American people during his first tour, Dickens later launched a second U.S. tour from 1867 to 1868, where he hoped to set things right with the public and made charismatic speeches promising to praise the United States in reprints of American Notes for General Circulation and Martin Chuzzlewit , his 1844 novel set in the American frontier.

On December 19, 1843, Dickens published A Christmas Carol , one of his most timeless and beloved works. The book features the famous protagonist Ebenezer Scrooge, a curmudgeonly old miser who—with the help of the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come—finds the holiday spirit. Dickens penned the book in just six weeks, beginning in October and finishing just in time for Christmas celebrations. Like his earlier works, it was intended as a social criticism, to bring attention to the hardships faced by England’s poorer classes.

The book was a roaring success, selling more than 6,000 copies upon publication. Readers in England and America were touched by the book’s empathetic emotional depth; one American entrepreneur reportedly gave his employees an extra day’s holiday after reading it. Despite its incredible success, the high production costs and Dickens’ disagreements with the publisher meant he received relatively few profits for A Christmas Carol , according to Kaplan, which were further reduced when Dickens was forced to take legal action against the publishers for making illegal copies.

A Christmas Carol was Dickens’ most popular book in the United States, selling more than two million copies in the century after its first publication there, according to Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin. It is also one of Dickens’ most adapted works, and Ebenezer Scrooge has been portrayed by such actors as Michael Caine, Albert Finney, Patrick Stewart, Tim Curry, and Jim Carrey .

Dickens published several other Christmas novellas following A Christmas Carol , including The Chimes (1844) The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life (1846), and The Haunted Man and the Ghost ’s Bargain (1848). In 1867, he wrote a stage play titled No Thoroughfare .

On June 8, 1870, Dickens had a stroke at his home in Kent, England, after a day of writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood . He died the next day at age 58.

At the time, Edwin Drood had begun its serial publication; it was never finished. Only half of the planned installments of his final novel were completed at the time of Dickens’ death, according to Fido.

Dickens was buried in Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey , with thousands of mourners gathering at the beloved author’s gravesite.

When 48 Doughty Street in London—which was Dickens’ home from 1837 to 1839—was threatened with demolition, it was saved by the Dickens Fellowship and renovated, becoming the Dickens House Museum . Open since 1925, it appears like a middle-class Victorian home exactly as Dickens lived in it, and it houses a significant collection related to Dickens and his works.

Many of Dickens’ major works have been adapted for movies and stage plays, with some, like A Christmas Carol , repackaged in various forms over the years. Reginald Owen portrayed Ebenezer Scrooge in one of the earliest Hollywood adaptations of the novella in 1938, while Albert Finney played the character alongside Alec Guinness as Marley’s ghost in the 1970 film Scrooge .

Some adaptations have taken unique approaches to the source material. Michael Caine portrayed Scrooge in The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992), with members of the Muppets playing other characters from the story, and Gonzo the Great portraying Dickens as a narrator. Bill Murray played a version of Scrooge in a modern-day comedic take on the classic story. Several animated versions of A Christmas Carol have also been adapted, with Jim Carrey playing Scrooge in a 2009 computer-generated film that used motion-capture animation to create the character.

Several more of Dickens’ works have been similarly adapted. Famed director David Lean made celebrated adaptations of both Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948). The latter novel was also adapted into a successful 1960 stage musical called Oliver! , and a 1968 movie version—directed by Carol Reed—of that same musical won the Academy Award for Best Picture and Director.

More recently, The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019) put a comedic spin on Dickens’ personal favorite of his own works, with Dev Patel performing the title role. Barbara Kingsolver also adapted the novel in her Pulitzer Prize winner Demon Copperhead (2022).

• The English are, as far as I know, the hardest worked people on whom the sun shines. Be content if in their wretched intervals of leisure they read for amusement and do no worse.
• I write because I can’t help it.
• Literature cannot be too faithful to the people, cannot too ardently advocate the cause of their advancement, happiness, and prosperity.
• An author feels as if he were dismissing some portion of himself into the shadowy world, when a crowd of the creatures of his brain are going from him forever.
• Nobody has done more harm in this single generation than everybody can mend in 10 generations.
• If I were soured [on writing], I should still try to sweeten the lives and fancies of others; but I am not—not at all.
• Well, the work is hard, the climate is hard, the life is hard: but so far the gain is enormous.
• Who that has ever reflected on the enormous and vast amount of leave-taking there is in life can ever have doubted the existence of another?
• I never knew what it was to feel disgust and contempt, till I traveled in America.
• My great ambition is to live in the hearts and homes of home-loving people and to be connected with the truth of the truthful English life.

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Where to start with: Charles Dickens

The great Victorian chronicler of inequality and poverty was also a tremendous – and prolific – storyteller. Here are some of the best ways in to his colossal legacy

A rguably the greatest writer of his time, Charles Dickens shaped the way we see Victorian Britain. His distinctive, quirky characters – many of them versions of people he encountered – have not only endured, but given us brilliantly expressive ways to refer to people in the modern day, whether they’re an Artful Dodger, a Miss Havisham or a Scrooge.

As well as 15 novels – his last, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, remains unfinished – Dickens wrote five novellas, a number of plays and many short stories. His novels are mostly built around the aching disparity between poverty and wealth, and to this day it is hard to find a more endearing and surprisingly mobilising writer.

The entry point

Perhaps the most well-known of his works, Oliver Twist was Dickens’ second novel. Even if you haven’t yet read the book, you will probably be familiar with the workhouse boy who asks for more, escapes to London and is recruited by the Artful Dodger to a gang of pickpockets led by the criminal Fagin. Adaptations have been abundant, whether in the form of the Lionel Bart musical, Oliver!, various other film and television versions, and, most recently, an audiobook version directed by Sam Mendes and starring Brian Cox, Daniel Kaluuya and Nicola Coughlan. Oliver Twist is a great introduction to the colourful realm of Dickens, particularly his lively, characterful and humorous dialogue.

The fan favourite

The most autobiographical of Dickens’ novels, David Copperfield is a coming-of-age story of a boy facing hurdles to complete his education and ultimately (spoiler!) becoming a successful author. It features chunks of a memoir Dickens once tried to write but abandoned out of self-consciousness - notably, his account of a two-year stint working in a boot blacking factory as a child after his father was sent to debtors’ prison. It was an ordeal that never left him and looms large over everything he wrote.

Not only is this novel a fan favourite, it was the author’s favourite too. In the preface to a later edition, Dickens wrote: “like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is David Copperfield.”

If you’re in a rush

Dickens wrote a great many short stories and some of them are among his best writing. A great place to start is The Signal-Man, one of his best-regarded short stories, about a railway worker tormented by a ghostly apparition that predicts terrible accidents. It is thought to have been inspired by Dickens’s experience in a major rail crash five years earlier that killed 23 people and left the author with what we would now know as post-traumatic stress disorder.

The Signal-Man is a great example of his fascination with the supernatural – ghosts feature dozens of times in his works – though “common sense” barred him from believing and, in his surviving letters, he wrote scathingly about those purporting to have been visited by spirits.

His short stories are also often where Dickens best exhibited his dry and cutting wit, and some of his satirical sketches are a great example of this. The Boy at Mugby, which is also inspired by his rail travel, is a portrait of a group of staff at the fictional Mugby station who strive for incompetence and aim to serve the worst food and drink possible.

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The page-turner

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” A Tale of Two Cities famously begins. It is a rare historical novel from the author, spread across London and Paris in the run-up to the French revolution. It was considered at the time the most un-Dickens-like of his books, more ambitious than his other stories. Most of Dickens’s stories were published serially in newspapers and journals as he wrote, allowing narratives and characters to be shaped by what his readers thought of them. A Tale of Two Cities is perhaps where this can be seen best – it’s easy to see how readers would have been left on tenterhooks waiting for the next instalment.

The one to drop into dinner party conversation

The most studied and analysed Dickens novel is one of his last, Great Expectations. The story of the timid orphan Pip and the obsessive and corrupting power of greed is a classic Dickens tale. Though a celebrity by this time and far from the poverty that shaped him, Dickens still wrote with enormous empathy for the working class and disdain for the wealthy, painting a bleak picture of lives disfigured by the desire for money.

If you only read one, it should be

Of course, the ultimate Dickens experience, particularly at this time of year, is A Christmas Carol. Unlike some of his heftier tomes, the novella can be read in a couple of hours, and is perhaps best consumed that way. A Christmas Carol tells the cautionary tale of Ebenezer Scrooge, a cruel and unpopular miser who is visited by three ghosts demonstrating what might become of him if he fails to change his ways. Not only is it a rich and well-crafted ghost story, with moments that are genuinely chilling, it is also remarkable as a work of serious political activism . As a passionate social justice campaigner, Dickens unashamedly used fiction as an agent for change, to push his ideas of equality, charity and fairness. In this case, Dickens had originally planned to write a political pamphlet, later realising a work of fiction might be a more palatable way of getting his message across.

A Christmas Carol was one of five Christmas novellas he wrote over near-consecutive years, which include the less well-known but equally excellent story The Chimes, also very much worth a read.

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Charles Dickens’ Best Books 📚

Throughout Dickens’ life, he wrote many well-loved novels. These include 'Great Expectations,' 'A Christmas Carol,' and 'Oliver Twist.' 

Quick Facts

Article written by Emma Baldwin

B.A. in English, B.F.A. in Fine Art, and B.A. in Art Histories from East Carolina University.

On this list, readers can explore ten of the best books that Charles Dickens wrote throughout his life. Some were more critically successful than others, but all are read to this day. Most feature themes like poverty, class divide, the treatment of the poor, and satirize social norms. 

Great Expectations

Great Expectations is Dickens’ thirteenth novel and one of his best-known. It is also his second to last completed novel. The book features the protagonist Pip, an orphan who grows up throughout the pages. It can be described as a bildungsroman or a coming-of-age novel. It was published as a serial starting in December of 1860 and ending in August of 1861. 

The book is set in London and features characters like Magwitch, Estella, Joe the blacksmith, and Miss. Havisham. 

A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Carol is another well-loved novel by Charles Dickens. It features the hard-to-love protagonist Ebenezer Scrooge who starts the book as a miserable and miserly man of business. As the book progresses, he is haunted by three ghosts—the Ghost of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. They show him who he was as a child, truths about his contemporary world, and what his future holds if he continues down the path he’s on. In the end, he determines to change his life and hold Christmas close to his heart for the rest of his days. 

David Copperfield 

David Copperfield is another example of a bildungsroman or coming of age novel. It features David Copperfield, who also narrates the novel. It details his life from the time he was born to his maturity. The book was published in 1849/1850 as a serial. In it, Dickens wove in some features from his own life. It was also his favorite book. It begins with a dark and troubling depiction of Victorian England and moves on to follow Copperfield as he grows up, moves through society, and studies. Its primary themes are those of growth and transformation. 

Oliver Twist 

Oliver Twist is Dickens’ second novel. It was published as a serial from 1837 to 1839 then as a three-part book in 1839. It follows Oliver Twist, who was born in a workhouse and later sold into an apprenticeship. He escapes from this life to travel throughout London. He meets Artful Dodger, a gang member, and pickpocket. The novel portrays the lives of criminals in Victorian London in a way that no other author ever had. It is also a social novel, one that draws the reader’s attention to issues of child labor and violence. 

Bleak House 

Bleak House is another long novel, published as a 20-part serial from 1852 to 1853. The novel is complex, featuring numerous characters, one of the central being Esther Summerson. The book is centered around a court case, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, in contention for years due to opposing wills. 

The Pickwick Papers 

The Pickwick Papers is a series of adventures written by Dickens in the mid-1830s. It was incredibly popular throughout Britain. It resulted in bootleg copies and even made its way into the theatre. The protagonist is Samuel Pickwick, a wealthy older man who founds the Pickwick Club. He and several other characters travel throughout London. 

Hard Times 

Hard Times is Dickens’ tenth novel. It is a social novel in that it features commentary and satire on contemporary English society. It is the shortest novel Dickens’ wrote and the only one that has no scenes set in London.

Throughout the novel’s history, its received mixed reviews from critics. This may be in part due to the fact that Dickens’ admitted to writing it as a way of boosting the sales of Household Words, his weekly periodical. Throughout, readers can explore Dickens’ depiction of the treatment of workers in Victorian England and the difference between social and economic classes. 

Nicholas Nickleby 

Nicholas Nickleby was Dickens’ third novel. It features Nicholas as the protagonist. The novel starts when the young man is forced to care for his mother and sister after his father dies. With little money, the family is forced to travel to London for assistance from their only living relative, Ralph Nickleby. He becomes the book’s antagonist, who often seems out to hurt and embarrass Nicholas. 

Little Dorrit 

Little Dorrit was published between 1855 and 1857. It tells the story of Amy Dorrit, who was born and raised in a debtor’s prison. Dickens uses the novel to satirize the social norms of the time and the institution of the debtor’s prison. In this setting, debtors, deemed criminals, were incarcerated until they could pay their debts. But, in prison, they were unable to work. The novel also focuses on themes like poverty and wealth. 

The Mystery of Edwin Drood

The Mystery of Edwin Drood is Dickens’ final novel. It is named after Edwin Drood, the nephew of the main character, John Jasper. The latter is an opium adductor and choirmaster who falls in love with one of his pupils, Rosa Bud (who is also Edwin’s fiancé). Edwin eventually disappears under mysterious circumstances. The book is set in the fictional town of Cloisterham (generally considered to be Rochester). 

What is the best Dickens book to read?

Of all of Dickens’ well-loved novels, Great Expectations is generally cited as the most popular and commonly read. Also, well-loved is David Copperfield and A Christmas Carol. 

Which Dickens novel should I start with?

David Copperfield and A Christmas Carol are generally considered to be the easiest of Dickens’ books to read. They might serve as a good place to start. 

What was Charles Dickens’ nickname?

Dickens’ nickname was “Boz.” He used it as a pseudonym in his early works. It originated from a nickname he gave his younger brother. 

What was Charles Dickens’ first book?

Dickens’ first book was The Pickwick Papers. It was published in 1836 and was an incredible success. It was the first novel to ever become widely popular throughout Victorian London. So much so, it spawned bootleg versions. 

About Emma Baldwin

Emma Baldwin, a graduate of East Carolina University, has a deep-rooted passion for literature. She serves as a key contributor to the Book Analysis team with years of experience.

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Peter Ackroyd

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Catherine Dickens

Catherine (Hogarth) Dickens (1815-1879) - Charles Dickens' wife, with whom he fathered 10 children. She was born in Scotland on May 19, 1815 and came to England with her family in 1834. Catherine was the daughter of George Hogarth , editor of the Evening Chronicle where Dickens was a young journalist. They were married on April 2, 1836 in St. Luke's Church, Chelsea and honeymooned in Chalk, near Chatham.

Charles was undoubtably in love at the outset but his feelings for Catherine wained as the family grew. With the birth of their last child in 1852 Dickens found Catherine an increasingly incompetent mother and housekeeper ( Johnson, 1952, p. 905-909 ) . Their separation, in 1858, was much publicized and rumors of Dickens unfaithfulness abounded, which he vehemently denied in public. Dickens and Catherine had little correspondence after the break, Catherine moving to a house in London with oldest son, Charley , and Dickens retreating to Gads Hill in Kent with Catherine's sister, Georgina , and all of the children except Charlie remaining with him. On her deathbed in 1879 she gave her collection of Dickens' letters to daughter Kate instructing her to " Give these to the British Museum, that the world may know he loved me once " ( Schlicke, 1999, p. 153-157 ) .

Katherine is buried at Highgate Cemetery , London.

Read a letter from Dickens to John Forster concerning separation from Catherine.

What Shall We Have for Dinner?

Around 1850 Catherine released a collection of recipes and bills of fare for dinners for from two to eighteen people. The book, published by Bradbury and Evans, was called What Shall We Have for Dinner? and was written under the pen name Lady Maria Clutterbuck. Charles Dickens wrote the introduction using Maria's voice ( Nayder, 2011, p. 186-189 ) . The book is referred to as the source of Christmas dinner in Thomas Keneally's novel The Dickens Boy .

Amazon.com: The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth by Lillian Nayder

The Life of Charles Dickens

An illustrated hypertext biography of charles dickens, childhood and education.

• The Law and Early Jounalism
• Early Novels
• Middle Years
• Later Years

At this point the family consisted of Charles, older sister Fanny , younger brothers Alfred and Frederick , and younger sister Letitia . Everyone except Charles and Fanny went to live in the Marshalsea with their parents. Fanny was boarding at the Royal Academy of Music, and Charles initially lodged with a landlady in Camden Town in north London. This proved to be too long a walk every day to the blacking factory and his family in the Marshalsea, so a room was found for him on Lant Street in Southwark near the prison.

Young Charles, who dreamed of growing up a gentleman, found these dreams dashed working alongside common boys at the blacking factory and later wrote "It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age." Dickens shared this painful part of his childhood through the story of David Copperfield although no one realized it was autobiographical until related by biographer John Forster after Dickens' death ( Forster, 1899, v. 1, p. 22-39 ) .

Charles was to further his education at Wellington House Academy , a school run by the harsh schoolmaster William Jones , a man who delighted in corporal punishment and who Dickens later described as " by far the most ignorant man I have ever had the pleasure to know ". Charles would spend nearly three years, aged 12-15, at Wellington House, leaving in the spring of 1827 ( Slater, 2009, p. 25-27 ) . Many of his experiences at school, and the masters who taught there, would later find their way into his fiction.

The Law and Early Journalism

Charles had been fascinated with the theatre since childhood and often attended the theatre to break the monotony of reporting on parliamentary proceedings. He wrote to George Bartley, manager of the Covent Garden Theatre, in 1832 asking for an audition, which was granted. On the day of the audition Charles was ill with a bad cold and inflammation of the face and missed the appointment. He wrote to Bartley explaining the illness and that he would apply for another audition next season. He would later marvel at how near he came to a very different sort of life ( Ackroyd, 1990, p. 139-140 ) .

Dickens, writing feverishly, as well as holding down the job of a reporter, now found himself in the throes of romance. He became a regular visitor to the Hogarth household and soon proposed marriage, which Catherine quickly accepted ( Slater, 2009, p. 47 ) . They were married at St. Luke's church, Chelsea on April 2, 1836. Two months previous his collection of short stories was published in book form by John Macrone entitled Sketches by Boz with illustrations by popular artist George Cruikshank ( Ackroyd, 1990, p. 174 ) . Dickens' pseudonym Boz came from his younger brother Augustus's through-the-nose pronunciation of his own nickname, Moses.

The Early Novels

Upon returning home he penned the promised travel book, American Notes , a rather unflattering description of America, and followed that with Martin Chuzzlewit , published in monthly parts, in which the protagonist goes to America and is subjected to the same sort of puffed up, mercenary people Dickens found there. The story was not well received and did not sell well ( Patten, 1978, p. 133 ) . Neither had Barnaby Rudge ( Schlicke, 1999, p. 33 ) , and Dickens felt that perhaps his lamp had gone out.

Dickens found himself in dire financial straits. He had borrowed heavily from his publishers for the American trip and his family continued to grow with their fifth child, son Francis , on the way. His feckless father was borrowing money in Charles' name behind his back. He needed an idea for a new book that would satisfy his pecuniary problems ( Slater, 2009, p. 215-220 ) .

The seeds for the story that became A Christmas Carol were planted in Dickens' mind during a trip to Manchester to deliver a speech in support of education. Thoughts of education as a remedy for crime and poverty, 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 ( Ackroyd, 1990, p. 408-409 ) . As the idea for the story took shape and the writing began in earnest, Dickens became engrossed in the book. He wrote that as the tale unfolded he " wept and laughed, and wept again' and that he 'walked about the black streets of London fifteen or twenty miles many a night when all sober folks had gone to bed " ( Forster, 1899, v. 1, p. 326 ) . Dickens was at odds with Chapman and Hall over the low receipts from Martin Chuzzlewit and decided to self-publish the book, overspending on color illustrations and lavish binding and then setting the cost low so that everyone could afford it ( Slater, 2009, p. 220 ) . The book was an instant success but royalties were low after production costs were paid .

Serialization of Martin Chuzzlewit came to a conclusion in July, 1844, and Dickens conceived of the idea of another travel book; this time he would go to Italy ( Ackroyd, 1990, p. 426 ) . The family spent a year in Italy, first in Genoa, and then traveling through the southern part of the country. He wrote the second of his Christmas Books, The Chimes ( Slater, 2009, p. 230-231 ) , while in Genoa and sent his adventures home in the form of letters which were published in the Daily News . These were collected into a single volume entitled Pictures from Italy in May, 1846 ( Davis, 1999, p. 318 ) .

During the 1840s Dickens, with a troupe of friends and family in tow, began acting in amateur theatricals in London and across Britain. Charles worked tirelessly as actor and stage manager and often adjusted scenes, assisted carpenters, invented costumes, devised playbills, and generally oversaw the entire production of the performances ( Forster, 1899, v. 1, p. 436 ) . The Dickens' amateur troupe even performed twice for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert ( Davis, 1999, p. 4 ) .

The Middle Years

In 1839 the Dickens family moved from Doughty Street to a larger home at Devonshire Terrace near Regent's Park . The family continued to grow with the addition of sons Alfred (1845), Sydney (1847), and Henry (1849).

Dickens continued to write a book for the Christmas season every year. After A Christmas Carol (1843), and The Chimes (1844), he followed with The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life (1846), and The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848). All of these sold well at the time of publication but none endured as A Christmas Carol has ( Schlicke, 1999, p. 97 ) .

Dickens had begun writing an autobiography in the late 1840s that he shared with his friend and future biographer, John Forster ( Forster, 1899, v. 1, p. 22 ) . He found the writing too painful and opted instead to work his story into the fictional account of David Copperfield , which he later described as his personal favorite among his novels ( David Copperfield , p. xii ) . The story was serialized from May 1849 until November 1850. During the writing of Copperfield the tireless Dickens began another venture, a weekly magazine called Household Words . Charles worked as editor as well as contributor with additional pieces supplied by other writers. Also during the writing of Copperfield Catherine gave birth to a daughter, named for David Copperfield's wife Dora ( Slater, 2009, p. 312 ) . Dora , sickly from birth, died at 8 months old ( Ackroyd, 1990, p. 627-628 ) .

Dickens followed David Copperfield with what many consider one of his finest novels, Bleak House ( Davis, 1999, p. 35 ) . Dickens used his previous experience as a court reporter to tell the story of a prolonged case in the Courts of Chancery. During the writing of Bleak House Catherine gave birth to a son, Edward (1852), nicknamed Plorn. Edward would be last of Charles and Catherine's children and the family moved again, this time to Tavistock House . Following Bleak House Dickens serialized his next book, Hard Times , in his weekly magazine, Household Words . Following Hard Times Dickens returned to the painful childhood memory of his father's imprisonment for debt with the story of Little Dorrit . Amy Dorrit's father, William , was a prisoner in the Marshalsea debtor's prison and Amy was born there.

During the 1850s Charles and Catherine's marriage started to show signs of trouble. Dickens grew increasingly dissatisfied with Catherine whom, after giving birth to ten children, had grown quite stout and lethargic. She was increasingly unable to keep up with her energetic husband ( Schlicke, 1999, p. 155 ) . The problem came to a head when Dickens became enthralled with a young actress he met during one of his amateur theatricals, Ellen Ternan . Charles and Catherine were separated in 1858 and caused a public stir mostly contributed to by Dickens' desire to exonerate himself ( Johnson, 1952, p. 922-925 ) . All of the Dickens children, with exception of Charley , would live with their father, as would Catherine's sister, Georgina . The relationship with Ternan, the depth of which is still being debated ( Ackroyd, 1990, p. 914-918 ) , would continue the rest of Dickens' life.

Dickens and his children now moved into the mansion Gads Hill Place in Kent that he had purchased in 1856 near his childhood home of Chatham. As a boy, Dickens would walk by the impressive house, built in 1780, with his father who told him that with hard work he could someday live in such a splendid mansion ( Forster, 1899, v. 1, p. 6 ) . In 1864 Dickens received, from actor friend Charles Fechter, a two-story Swiss chalet that Dickens had installed across the road from Gads Hill with a tunnel under the road for access ( Ackroyd, 1990, p. 955-956 ) . Dickens wrote his his final works in his study on the top floor of the chalet.

The separation with Catherine also caused a rift between Dickens and his publishers, Bradbury and Evans . Bradbury and Evans also published the popular magazine Punch . When they refused to publish Dickens' personal statement , his explanation for the recent separation, Charles was furious and refused to have further dealings with them. He ceased publication of his weekly magazine, Household Words , continuing it under a new name, All the Year Round , and with his old publishers, Chapman and Hall ( Kaplan, 1988, p. 395-401 ) .

In the 1850s Dickens began reading excerpts of his books in public, first for charity, and, beginning in 1858, for profit. These readings proved extremely popular with the public and Dickens continued them for the rest of his life. The readings included excerpts from his Christmas books , David Copperfield , and Nicholas Nickleby , with A Christmas Carol , for which he wrote a condensed verion , and The Trial from Pickwick being the most popular ( Davis, 1999, p. 328 ) . He later included the dramatic murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist , the performance of which took a toll on Dickens' fragile health ( Johnson, 1952, p. 1144 ) .

The Later Years

In May, 1864, Dickens began publication of what would be his last completed novel. Published in monthly installments, Our Mutual Friend touches the familiar theme of the evils and corruption that the love of money brings. Poor health causing perhaps a stutter in his usual creative genius, Dickens found beginning the novel difficult, he wrote to Forster "Although I have not been wanting in industry, I have been wanting in invention" ( Letters, 1998, v. 10, p. 414 ) . After finally finding his footing, the monthly installments did not sell well despite a massive advertising blitz ( Patten, 1978, p. 307-308 ) .

On the 9th of June, 1865, traveling back from France with Ellen Ternan and her mother, and with the latest installment of Our Mutual Friend , the train in which they were traveling was involved in an accident in Staplehurst, Kent. Many were killed but Dickens and his companions escaped serious injury although Dickens was severely shaken. Three years later he wrote that he still experienced " vague rushes of terror even riding in hansom cabs " ( Johnson, 1952, p. 1018-1021 ) .

In the late 1850s Dickens began to contemplate a second visit to America , tempted by the money he could make by extending his public readings there. Despite pleas not to go from friends and family because of increasingly ill health ( Johnson, 1952, p. 1070 ) , he finally decided to go and arrived in Boston on November 19, 1867. The original plan called for a visit to Chicago and as far west as St. Louis. Because of ill health and bad weather this idea was scrapped and Dickens did not venture from the northeastern states ( Slater, 2009, p. 580 ) . He stayed for 5 months and gave 76 extremely popular performances for which he earned, after expenses, an incredible £19,000 ( Schlicke, 1999, p. 17 ) .

Dickens returned home in May, 1868, somewhat revitalized during the sea voyage, to a full load of work. He immediately plunged back into editing All the Year Round and, in October, began a farewell reading tour of Britain that included a new, very passionate, and physically taxing, performance of the murder of Nancy from Oliver Twist ( Davis, 1999, p. 353 ) .

Monthly publication of what was to be his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood , began in April, 1870. On the evening of June 8, 1870, Dickens, after working on the latest installment of Drood that morning in the chalet at Gads Hill , suffered a stroke and died the next day ( Ackroyd, 1990, p. 1076-1079 ) . The Mystery of Edwin Drood was exactly half finished and the mystery is unsolved to this day .

Dickens had wished to be buried, without fanfare, in a small cemetery in Rochester, but the Nation would not allow it. He was laid to rest in Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey, the flowers from thousands of mourners overflowing the open grave ( Forster, 1899, v. 2, p. 513 ) .

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Biography of Charles Dickens, English Novelist

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Charles Dickens (February 7, 1812–June 9, 1870) was a popular English novelist of the Victorian era, and to this day he remains a giant in British literature. Dickens wrote numerous books that are now considered classics, including "David Copperfield," "Oliver Twist," "A Tale of Two Cities," and "Great Expectations." Much of his work was inspired by the difficulties he faced in childhood as well as social and economic problems in Victorian Britain.

Fast Facts: Charles Dickens

• Known For : Dickens was the popular author of "Oliver Twist," "A Christmas Carol," and other classics.
• Born : February 7, 1812 in Portsea, England
• Parents : Elizabeth and John Dickens
• Died : June 9, 1870 in Higham, England
• Published Works : Oliver Twist (1839), A Christmas Carol (1843), David Copperfield (1850), Hard Times (1854), Great Expectations (1861)
• Spouse : Catherine Hogarth (m. 1836–1870)
• Children : 10

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Portsea, England. His father had a job working as a pay clerk for the British Navy, and the Dickens family, by the standards of the day, should have enjoyed a comfortable life. But his father's spending habits got them into constant financial difficulties. When Charles was 12, his father was sent to debtors' prison, and Charles was forced to take a job in a factory that made shoe polish known as blacking.

Life in the blacking factory for the bright 12-year-old was an ordeal. He felt humiliated and ashamed, and the year or so he spent sticking labels on jars would be a profound influence on his life. When his father managed to get out of debtors' prison, Charles was able to resume his sporadic schooling. However, he was forced to take a job as an office boy at the age of 15.

By his late teens, he had learned stenography and landed a job as a reporter in the London courts. By the early 1830s , he was reporting for two London newspapers.

Early Career

Dickens aspired to break away from newspapers and become an independent writer, and he began writing sketches of life in London. In 1833 he began submitting them to a magazine, The Monthly . He would later recall how he submitted his first manuscript, which he said was "dropped stealthily one evening at twilight, with fear and trembling, into a dark letter box, in a dark office, up a dark court in Fleet Street."

When the sketch he'd written, titled "A Dinner at Poplar Walk," appeared in print, Dickens was overjoyed. The sketch appeared with no byline, but soon he began publishing items under the pen name "Boz."

The witty and insightful articles Dickens wrote became popular, and he was eventually given the chance to collect them in a book. "Sketches by Boz" first appeared in early 1836, when Dickens had just turned 24. Buoyed by the success of his first book, he married Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of a newspaper editor. He settled into a new life as a family man and an author.

Rise to Fame

"Sketches by Boz" was so popular that the publisher commissioned a sequel, which appeared in 1837. Dickens was also approached to write the text to accompany a set of illustrations, and that project turned into his first novel, "The Pickwick Papers," which was published in installments from 1836 to 1837. This book was followed by "Oliver Twist," which appeared in 1839.

Dickens became amazingly productive. "Nicholas Nickleby" was written in 1839, and "The Old Curiosity Shop" in 1841. In addition to these novels, Dickens was turning out a steady stream of articles for magazines. His work was incredibly popular. Dickens was able to create remarkable characters, and his writing often combined comic touches with tragic elements. His empathy for working people and for those caught in unfortunate circumstances made readers feel a bond with him.

As his novels appeared in serial form, the reading public was often gripped with anticipation. The popularity of Dickens spread to America, and there were stories told about how Americans would greet British ships at the docks in New York to find out what had happened next in Dickens' latest novel.

Visit to America

Capitalizing on his international fame, Dickens visited the United States in 1842 when he was 30 years old. The American public was eager to greet him, and he was treated to banquets and celebrations during his travels.

In New England, Dickens visited the factories of Lowell, Massachusetts, and in New York City he was taken to the see the Five Points , the notorious and dangerous slum on the Lower East Side. There was talk of him visiting the South, but as he was horrified by the idea of enslavement he never went south of Virginia.

Upon returning to England, Dickens wrote an account of his American travels which offended many Americans.

'A Christmas Carol'

In 1842, Dickens wrote another novel, "Barnaby Rudge." The following year, while writing the novel "Martin Chuzzlewit," Dickens visited the industrial city of Manchester, England. He addressed a gathering of workers, and later he took a long walk and began to think about writing a Christmas book that would be a protest against the profound economic inequality he saw in Victorian England. Dickens published " A Christmas Carol " in December 1843, and it became one of his most enduring works.

Dickens traveled around Europe during the mid-1840s. After returning to England, he published five new novels: "Dombey and Son," "David Copperfield," "Bleak House," "Hard Times," and "Little Dorrit."

By the late 1850s , Dickens was spending more time giving public readings. His income was enormous, but so were his expenses, and he often feared he would be plunged back into the sort of poverty he had known as a child.

Charles Dickens, in middle age, appeared to be on top of the world. He was able to travel as he wished, and he spent summers in Italy. In the late 1850s, he purchased a mansion, Gad's Hill, which he had first seen and admired as a child.

Despite his worldly success, though, Dickens was beset by problems. He and his wife had a large family of 10 children, but the marriage was often troubled. In 1858, a personal crisis turned into a public scandal when Dickens left his wife and apparently began a secretive affair with actress Ellen "Nelly" Ternan, who was only 19 years old. Rumors about his private life spread. Against the advice of friends, Dickens wrote a letter defending himself, which was printed in newspapers in New York and London.

For the last 10 years of his life, Dickens was often estranged from his children, and his relationships with old friends suffered.

Though he hadn't enjoyed his tour of America in 1842, Dickens returned in late 1867. He was again welcomed warmly, and large crowds flocked to his public appearances. He toured the East Coast of the United States for five months.

He returned to England exhausted, yet continued to embark on more reading tours. Though his health was failing, the tours were lucrative, and he pushed himself to keep appearing onstage.

Dickens planned a new novel for publication in serial form. "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" began appearing in April 1870. On June 8, 1870, Dickens spent the afternoon working on the novel before suffering a stroke at dinner. He died the next day.

The funeral for Dickens was modest, and praised, according to a New York Times article, as being in keeping with the "democratic spirit of the age." Dickens was accorded a high honor, however, as he was buried in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey, near other literary figures such as Geoffrey Chaucer , Edmund Spenser , and Dr. Samuel Johnson.

The importance of Charles Dickens in English literature remains enormous. His books have never gone out of print, and they are widely read to this day. As the works lend themselves to dramatic interpretation, numerous plays, television programs, and feature films based on them continue to appear.

• Kaplan, Fred. "Dickens: a Biography." Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
• Tomalin, Claire. "Charles Dickens: a Life." Penguin Press, 2012.
• Why Dickens Wrote 'A Christmas Carol'
• A Review of 'David Copperfield'
• How Can You Stretch a Paper to Make it Longer?
• Discussion Questions for 'A Christmas Carol'
• A Summary of 'A Christmas Carol'
• The History of Christmas Traditions
• Where Did the Term 'Humbug' Originate?
• The Most Important Quotes From Charles Dickens's 'Oliver Twist'
• Notable Authors of the 19th Century
• 'Great Expectations' Review
• Life of Wilkie Collins, Grandfather of the English Detective Novel
• Dickens' 'Oliver Twist': Summary and Analysis
• "A Tale of Two Cities" Discussion Questions
• 'A Christmas Carol' Quotations
• The Haunted House (1859) by Charles Dickens
• Biography of George Eliot, English Novelist

Charles Dickens: A Biography

Charles dickens 1812-1870.

Charles Dickens was an extraordinary man. He is best known as a novelist but he was very much more than that. He was as prominent in his other pursuits but they were not areas of life where we can still see him today. We see him as the author of such classics as Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, Bleak House and many others. All of his novels are English classics.

Dickens had an almost unbelievable level of energy. In addition to writing all those lengthy books in long-hand, he had time to pursue what would have been full-time careers for most people in acting, literary editing social campaigning and philanthropic administration. He was also the father of a large family, as well as being involved in a love affair that lasted many years.

He began as a journalist, writing little pieces about daily life and developed very quickly into a best-selling novelist, avidly read throughout the English speaking world. At the same time he was appearing in plays and touring, reading from his novels. And editing his literary hournals, Household Words and All the Year Round , which featured the serialisation of his novels, with people queuing up to buy them, eager to find out how the previous episode would be concluded.

Charles Dickens photograph

As a child Dickens saw his father imprisoned for debt and that led him to a lifelong interest in prisons and the need for the reform of the system. Many of his novels reveal the cold hard facts of the Victorian prison system and, with so many readers, the novels had a great effect on the consciousness of the public. In addition to that Dickens campaigned and lobbied for reform.

Dickens was a man who seemed to be able to direct his efforts in several directions and give each his full attention. He spent ten years running Urania Cottage, a home for ‘fallen women.’ And organisation aimed at helping the women get back to respectable life, either in England or Australia or America. He spent his own money on the project and gave it his full attention.

It is difficult to imagine English culture without the characters who inhabit Dickens’ novels. Just a mention of the name ‘Miss Havisham,’ brings up the image of someone embittered and socially marginalised, living in an unreal world that has stopped turning. ‘Mr Gradgrind’ creates the image of inflexibility and Mr McCawber the delusional optimist, always relying on his cheerful belief that something will turn up to solve his problems, makes us shake our heads with a mixture of amusement and pity.

Where would English culture be if there had been no Fagin, no Oliver Twist, no Ebenezer Scrooge? What graphic image would we have of a fawning, writhing, hypocritical functionary without Uriah Heep springing into our minds? And what about the pompous Mr Bumble and the cruel, cold-hearted Mr Murdstone and his iron sister, Miss Murdstone? The list of Dickens characters who have embedded themselves firmly in English culture is endless, and we’ve had a go at pulling together their many thoughts and sayings in this list of the most well known Charles Dickens quotes .

Dickens’ novels, which lend themselves to dramatisation for stage, television and film, are delightful to read and several are regarded as the greatest of English novels. Indeed, Bleak House is acclaimed by critics as being among the greatest of world novels, in the same category as Huckleberry Finn , Crime and Punishment , War and Peace , Pride and Prejudice and Moby Dick .

Read biographies of the top 10 English writers >>

Read biographies of the 30 greatest writers ever >>

Interested in Charles Dickens? If so you can get some additional free information by visiting our friends over at PoemAnalysis to read their analysis of Dicken’s poetic works .

• Pinterest 0

There pride and prejudice is not written by him there is a mention in the article. It is written by jane austen

Wow. Really awesome article. Can I get his book online?

The humour in Pickwick Papers is wonderful, and his descriptions of that world are just as if Dickens himself was talking to me. It’s as close to space travel as one can get.

how can I get this?

All line understood, really ur writting styles is beauty

He is a wonderful short story writer

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Charles Dickens

• Classic Literature
• Classic Authors

The Classic Literature Library presents

The Complete Literary Works of Charles Dickens

Dickens, Charles John Huffam (1812-1870), probably the best-known and, to many people, the greatest English novelist of the 19th century. A moralist, satirist, and social reformer, Dickens crafted complex plots and striking characters that capture the panorama of English society.

Continue reading Charles Dickens Biography .

Charles Dickens Novels

• The Pickwick Papers 1837
• Oliver Twist 1838
• The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby 1839
• The Old Curiosity Shop 1841
• Barnaby Rudge A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty 1841
• Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit 1844
• Dombey and Son 1848
• David Copperfield 1850
• Bleak House 1853
• Hard Times 1854
• Little Dorrit 1857
• A Tale of Two Cities 1859
• Great Expectations 1861
• Our Mutual Friend 1865
• The Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished; 1870

Charles Dickens Short Stories

• A Message From the Sea
• Doctor Marigold
• George Silverman's Explanation
• Going Into Society
• Holiday Romance
• Hunted Down
• Mrs Lirriper's Legacy
• Mrs Lirriper's Lodgings
• Mugby Junction
• Somebody's Luggage
• Some Short Christmas Stories
• Sunday Under Three Heads
• The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain
• The Holly Tree Three Branches
• The Lamplighter
• The Perils of Certain English Prisoners
• The Seven Poor Travellers
• The Wreck of the Golden Mary
• Tom Tiddler's Ground

Other books and works by Charles Dickens

• A Child's History of England
• A Christmas Carol
• A House to Let
• American Notes for General Circulation
• Master Humphrey's Clock
• Miscellaneous Papers
• Mudfog and Other Sketches
• No Thoroughfare
• Pictures from Italy
• Reprinted Pieces
• Sketches by Boz
• Sketches of Young Couples
• Sketches of Young Gentlemen
• Speeches: Literary And Social by Charles Dickens
• The Battle of Life
• The Cricket on the Hearth
• The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices
• The Uncommercial Traveller
• Three Ghost Stories: The Haunted House
• Three Ghost Stories: The Signal Man
• Three Ghost Stories: The Trial For Murder
• To be Read at Dusk

Oxford University Press's Academic Insights for the Thinking World

How to co-write a book 3,000 miles apart: In Dialogue with Dickens [long read]

In Dialogue with Dickens: The Mind of the Heart

Written in the form of a back-and-forth dialogue between the two authors, In Dialogue with Dickens: The Mind of the Heart, is about the relationship between feeling and thinking in Dickens’s novels.

• By Rosemarie Bodenheimer and Philip Davis
• April 25 th 2024

RB lives outside Boston in the United States, PD across the Mersey from Liverpool, England. We have never met in person. We had found each other’s previous writings and ways of thinking sympathetic, in particular concerning the relation of writers and their autobiographical selves in the act of writing fiction. RB began publishing on Dickens in 1979, her book  Knowing Dickens  appearing in 2007.  David Copperfield  was part of PD’s  Memory and Writing  (1983), and Dickens figured largely in his volume on  The Victorians  for the Oxford English Literary History series in 2002. But we first encountered each other by exchanging drafts of the volumes we separately wrote for Oxford University Press’s series  My Reading  during 2020: one  Samuel Beckett , the other  William James .

What we had valued in the right-hand marginal notes provided by track changes was a form of excited interruption, adding an extra dimension to the otherwise continuous unfolding of one person’s thought process in the main body of the text.

What made it a real meeting during lockdown was that in each case whoever acted as reader found time and again what the writer had privately felt was his or her best or newest or most exciting place in the manuscript; the reader pointing through track changes and marginal comments to moments of sudden potential that needed or called for ‘more’, for further development. There was a wavelength. We decided to take this affinity and try to recreate it within a fuller collaboration. Our editor at OUP had already suggested a book on Dickens. But we knew that if wanted to recapture in a different form what we had been able to do for each other in the  My Reading projects, it would not be by writing separate chapters in such a book, jointly authored. What we had valued in the right-hand marginal notes provided by track changes was a form of excited interruption, adding an extra dimension to the otherwise continuous unfolding of one person’s thought process in the main body of the text. We were not simply looking for each other’s cosy approval, any more than we prized merely opinionated disagreement, but what was most radically powerful in the process was when the reader picked up the thought of the writer, stopped it, felt and received its impact, and then gave it back again with added personal weight and a renewed sense of its living value. Often the comments were relatively raw and muted, pointing to something vital, saying wow, thinking of a related or contrasting example elsewhere, or noting that it made a difference somehow that it was this phrase or this situation and not another. This seemed to us more literary, or at least more like what literary thinking came out of, than offering immediate conceptual explanation. It was also more like speaking, another voice, an informal accompaniment. We felt we could only try to reproduce this sense of a jointly generated spark through dialogue: that spark was what thinking felt like at its best—electric, sudden, visceral, shared across poles—and this was what Dickens himself was like.

We communicated across the distance between America and England via books, via Dickens, trying to use our different lives in the same common purpose: In dialogue with Dickens.

Looking to create something other than interpretation from a single position, we wanted to open out the conventional form of the scholarly monograph: to include the rough beginnings of thoughts coming into being, to follow more than one line of argument at a time, and to register the after-meaning of the work as well as its immediacy. We hoped to let in the spirit of the inarticulately unknown or the personally hidden, felt, and imagined in author and readers alike, and to show unabashedly what matters to us, in both small detail and large concern, and in the relation between them. We communicated across the distance between America and England via books, via Dickens, trying to use our different lives in the same common purpose: in dialogue with Dickens.

It was at first a hesitant process. After some email discussion and drafting, we submitted a sketchy proposal and rough sample to OUP in October 2021 which went out for readers’ reports, and we were offered a formal contract in April 2022. In the meantime we resolved to go ahead anyway. We had decided, with qualms, to start with  Dombey and Son  and began to read it separately, at around the same pace, stopping to send each other emails on initial thoughts, however simple, with reading still in progress. We tried not to be too worried about either impressing or annoying each another, or to be quite conscious that we might be testing each other and the possibility of our working relationship. It began to go well when we noticed the same details, were moved by the same painful places, or discovered together in a shared area of feeling something new or latent that we could not have got to separately or more formally.

Then one of us might ask, anxiously: are we agreeing too much? Does it look chummy or false, like (yuck!): What a wonderful point you have made there, PD/RB!

This graduated to writing up the emails into the beginnings of a script. Best of all, one of us might say something like:

You go on from this good point you’ve made here, and develop it however you like for a couple of pages. We won’t bother initially with who is writing the most or whether either of us is going on too long and forgetting the other. As long as we are just concentrating on Dickens, instead of ourselves, that’s all we need to share. Then I will just take your two or three pages and if I want to, interrupt them with something they have made me want to say, inserting that in the midst if needs be, like the marginal comment in our previous partnership. And then you can respond and readjust in light of what I’ve said. Then we can keep asking: what is the next thought, what passage in Dickens will help us here?

It helped then to begin to have weekly meetings by Zoom from April 2022. What did this sentence mean in your last draft? Why should this thought or this situation matter so much to you personally? Or: Where should we go next? How can we keep this as close as possible to thinking in real time, without being sloppy? And are we only talking to ourselves? Or again: how can we best share this with an audience, without explaining too much, too sedately, in the aftermath of actually doing the thinking between us? Then one of us might ask, anxiously: are we agreeing too much? Does it look chummy or false, like (yuck!): What a wonderful point you have made there, PD/RB!

But really what we were doing mainly was trying to help each other, or rather help the thought between each other: not argue or agree, so much as develop, extend, push each other harder to get somewhere—in the chapter, into Dickens. We set ourselves homework before our next meeting, exchanged parts of Dickens’s manuscripts in PDF format, divvied up tasks, discussed different forms and shapes and divisions for the best presentation of our thinking, made notes and exchanged records of our discussions, sent pages back and forth, alternately, day after day—and in short and in truth, began to feel cheered and stimulated by each other.

…our aim was to show what goes on behind the scenes of a finished, published work, as still part of its meaning.

Over the many decades of our separate commitments to thinking about Dickens, both of us have read widely in the rich store of Dickens scholarship. But we decided early on that we would not, for the most part, stop to put ourselves in direct agreement or contention with specific critical arguments. Previous work on Dickens had become an implicit part of our thinking, such that we have not always known exactly how and when we absorbed it. We didn’t want in writing and rewriting to lose that human sense of a first experience, a sudden realization coming from somewhere prior to professionalization. In relation to ourselves, to the Dickens manuscripts, and to the use Dickens made of his life in his fiction, our aim was to show what goes on behind the scenes of a finished, published work, as still part of its meaning.

When it came to revising, we therefore needed to resist the temptation to smooth it all down, to create neat chronologies and lines of argument when rhythmically it hadn’t been like that in the first place. Naturally we cut what we thought were the boring bits, the undue repetitions, the moments when we had lost the originating spark. One thing we hardly ever cut or changed were those moments when one of us might say, ‘It is almost as though… almost as if…’ on the threshold of language; or would interject ‘I love the way that…’ on the basis of owned relish.

So we have sought neither to tame and tidy our thinking nor to be too obtrusively personal or wildly obscure. But when we have veered one way or another, we have tried to keep in our attempted correction of the course en route. That is why we found ourselves writing sections or even chapters that were like inserted ‘time-out’, sites of explicit revision, visible rethinking, placed in between one stage of the novel and another, or after our account of a novel had seemingly ended. We then went through the whole manuscript with the same principles and caveats, needing to stay quick in order not to forget its spirit, and completing it, for better or worse, a year ahead of schedule.

That’s our story.

This blog post has been adapted from the Preface to In Dialogue with Dickens: The Mind of the Heart by the authors.

Featured image: Dickens giving the last reading of his Works. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark. Source: Wellcome Collection. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/t2fy7db2

Rosemarie Bodenheimer , Professor Emerita of English, Boston College, and  Philip Davis , Emeritus Professor of Literature and Psychology, University of Liverpool.

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Barbara Walters Did the Work

In “The Rulebreaker,” Susan Page pays tribute to a pioneering journalist who survived being both a punchline and an icon.

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By Lisa Schwarzbaum

Lisa Schwarzbaum is a former critic for Entertainment Weekly.

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THE RULEBREAKER: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters, by Susan Page

Much of the material in “The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters” has been told before, with persuasive narrative control, by the late television journalist herself in her dishy 2008 memoir, “Audition.” Don’t let that stop the reader of this thorough, compassionate biography by Susan Page: It’s a valuable document, sobering where “Audition” aimed for sassy.

If anything, the 16 long years between autobiography and biography endow the two books, taken together, with a memento mori gravitas for any student of Walters, or of television journalism, or of the past, present and future of women in the TV workplace — or, for that matter, of Monica Lewinsky. More on her in a moment.

Walters called her autobiography “Audition” to emphasize the need she always felt to prove herself, pushing her way to professional success in a world that never made it easy for her. Nearly 80 then and still in the game, she acknowledged that personal contentment — love, marriage, meaningful family connections — lagged far behind. She wrote of being the daughter of an erratic father, who bounced — sometimes suicidally — between flush times and financial failure as a nightclub owner and impresario.

She told of her fearful mother, and of the mentally disabled older sister to whose welfare she felt yoked. She wrote of the three unsatisfying marriages, and of her strained relationship with the daughter she adopted as an infant.

She breezily acknowledged the ease she felt throughout her life with complicated men of elastic ethics like Roy Cohn and Donald Trump. She leaned into her reputation as a “pushy cookie.”

Page, the Washington bureau chief of USA Today, who has also written books about Barbara Bush and Nancy Pelosi, tells many of the same stories. (“Audition” is an outsize presence in the endnotes.) But in placing the emphasis on all the rule-breaking Barbara Jill Walters had to do over her long life — she died in 2022 at 93 — the biographer pays respect to a toughness easy to undervalue today, when the collective memory may see only the well-connected woman with the instantly recognizable (thanks to Gilda Radner’s “SNL” impression) speech impediment.

There was no one like her — not Diane, not Katie, not Judy, not Connie, not Gwen, not Christiane. Not Ellen. Not Oprah. Having created her niche, Walters fought all her life to protect it. Because no one else would. Would that be the case today? Discuss.

“At age 35,” Page writes, “she had finally found her place, a space that bridged journalism and entertainment and promotion. Traditionalists viewed the combination with consternation. She ignored their doubts as she redefined their industry. She saw herself as a journalist, albeit of a new and evolving sort. In some ways, she would make herself a leader in the news business by changing what, exactly, that could include.”

Walters broke rules to save her father from debt and jail. She broke rules to secure on-air status — and pay — equal to that of the often hostile men around her. Walters broke rules to land scoops, gain access and bag interviews.

The account of the driven competition she felt with her fellow TV journalist Diane Sawyer is both fun and silly/sad in its evocation of a catty rumble: Isn’t such competition the everyday reality of the bookers working for the famous men who currently host late-night talk shows? Aren’t those late-night hybrids now the closest thing we have to influential news interviews — except, perhaps, on the women-talking daytime show “The View,” invented in large part by Barbara Walters?

Walters didn’t break rules to get the first on-air interview with Monica Lewinsky — she just worked her tuchis off, from the day the news of an affair broke to the night of March 3, 1999 — watched by 74 million Americans.

Walters was nearly 70 and famous; Lewinsky was a private 25-year-old woman whose affair with her married boss had thrown a country into hypocritical hysterics. The process of establishing trust could not be rushed.

The older woman asked the younger woman a chain of tough questions about sex and intimacy and character and judgment that no human should have to endure on national television. The younger woman answered with a dignity currently out of fashion both in celebrity self-presentation and on the floor of the U.S. Congress.

In the quarter-century since that extraordinary event — the essence of a Barbara Walters Interview — Lewinsky has demonstrated an inspiring power to live on her own terms and not on the assumptions of others. The achievement required rules to be broken, and has come with a price.

Barbara Walters knew what that was like.

THE RULEBREAKER : The Life and Times of Barbara Walters | By Susan Page | Simon & Schuster | 444 pp. | $30.99

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