Charles Dickens (1812–70) was one of England’s greatest novelists. This quintessential Victorian author is recognized primarily for his epic stories, vivid characters, and thorough portrayal of contemporary life.
Dickens’s story is one of the rags to riches. He was born in Portsmouth. His schooling was brief because his father was imprisoned for bad debt. In the custom of the time, the whole family, except for Charles, was sent to prison along with their patriarch. Two days after his 12th birthday, Dickens was sent to work as a boy-apprentice in a blacking factory, pasting labels on pots of dye for 12 hours a day in a rat-infested warehouse. After four months, he was rescued by his father and allowed to resume his education. The humiliating stigma and the appalling conditions, as well as loneliness and despair, became fictionalized in two of Dickens’s better-known novels David Copperfield (1849–50) and Great Expectations (1860–61.)
Critical estimation of Dickens’s literary career commonly splits his novels into two sets: the early novels, from his début with The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) to David Copperfield, and his later novels, beginning with Bleak House (1853.) Admirers of all that is commonly meant by the term Dickensian—the novelist’s irrepressible verve and his inexhaustible supply of eccentrics, comic situations, emotions, and humor—locate Dickens’s greatness in his first period.
Dickens’s novella A Christmas Carol (1843,) remains popular and continues to inspire adaptations in every artistic genre. Oliver Twist (1837–39) and Great Expectations are also frequently adapted. His 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities, set in London and Paris, is his best-known work of historical fiction.
Dickens managed a full social and personal life while working at a frenzied pace. As well as a massive list of novels he published an autobiography, edited weekly periodicals including Household Words and All Year Round, wrote travel books and administered charitable organizations. He was also a theatre enthusiast, wrote plays, and performed before Queen Victoria in 1851. His later career was marked by domestic unhappiness, in which he separated from his wife and had an affair with Ellen Teman, an actress 20 years his junior. He died of a stroke in 1870 and is buried at Westminster Abbey.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Charles Dickens
Charity begins at home and justice begins next door.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Justice, Welfare, Charity
All of us have wonders hidden in our breasts, only needing circumstances to evoke them.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Confidence
There is a wisdom of the head, and… a wisdom of the heart.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Wisdom
“A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!” cried a cheerful voice. “Bah!” said Scrooge. “Humbug!”
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Christmas
Never close your lips to those to whom you have opened your heart.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Romance
The law is sic a ass – a idiot.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Government
Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days, that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the sailor and the traveler, thousands of miles away, back to his own fireside and his quiet home!
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Christmas
At this festive season of the year, Mr Scrooge, said the gentleman, taking up a pen, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. … We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices.”
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Abundance, Christmas
Such is hope, heaven’s own gift to struggling mortals, pervading, like some subtle essence from the skies, all things both good and bad.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Hope
I never see any difference in boys. I only know two sorts of boys. Mealy boys and beef-faced boys.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Children
Mature affection, homage, devotion, does not easily express itself. Its voice is low. It is modest and retiring, it lays in ambush and waits. Such is the mature fruit. Sometimes a life glides away, and finds it still ripening in the shade. The light inclinations of very young people are as dust compared to rocks.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Affection
A friendly swarry, consisting of a boiled leg of mutton with the usual trimmings.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Eating
This is a world of action, and not for moping and droning in.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Action, Inaction, Procrastination, Living, Life, Getting Going
Here’s the rule for bargains: “Do other men, for they would do you.” That’s the true business precept.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Shopping
The whole difference between construction and creation is this; that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: To Be Born Everyday, Creativity
Minerva House was “a finishing establishment for young ladies,” where some twenty girls of the ages from thirteen to nineteen inclusive, acquired a smattering of everything and a knowledge of nothing.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Education, School
May I tell you why it seems to me a good thing for us to remember wrong that has been done us? That we may forgive it.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Forgiveness
Whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do it well; whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself completely; in great aims and in small I have always thoroughly been in earnest.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Doing Your Best
The sum of the whole is this: walk and be happy; walk and be healthy.—The best way to lengthen, out our days is to walk steadily and with a purpose.—The wandering man knows of certain ancients, far gone in years, who have staved off infirmities and dissolution by earnest walking—hale fellows, close upon ninety, but brisk as boys.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Walking
There are only two styles of portrait painting; the serious and the smirk.
—Charles Dickens
It always grieves me to contemplate the initiation of children into the ways of life when they are scarcely more than infants.—It checks their confidence and simplicity, two of the best qualities that heaven gives them, and demands that they share our sorrows before they are capable of entering into our enjoyments.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Children
The first external revelations of the dry-rot in men is a tendency to lurk and lounge; to be at street corners without intelligible reason; to be going anywhere when met; to be about many places rather than any; to do nothing tangible but to have an intention of performing a number of tangible duties tomorrow or the day after.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Idleness
Night, like a giant, fills the church, from pavement to roof, and holds dominion through the silent hours. Pale dawn again comes peeping through the windows: and, giving place to day, sees night withdraw into the vaults, and follows it, and drives it out, and hides among the dead.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Night
I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the word, without coming here.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Bores, Boredom
If its individual citizens, to a man, are to be believed, it always is depressed, and always is stagnated, and always is at an alarming crisis, and never was otherwise; though as a body, they are ready to make oath upon the Evangelists, at any hour of the day or night, that it is the most thriving and prosperous of all countries on the habitable globe.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: America
There is a passion for hunting something deeply implanted in the human breast.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Hunting
A little learning is a dangerous thing, but a little patronage more so.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Attitude
He had but one eye and the pocket of prejudice runs in favor of two.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Eyes
There is nothing truer than physiognomy, taken in connection with manner.
—Charles Dickens
Dreams are the bright creatures of poem and legend, who sport on earth in the night season, and melt away in the first beam of the sun, which lights grim care and stern reality on their daily pilgrimage through the world.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Dreams
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