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
Have a heart that never hardens, a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Heart, Kindness
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
Although a skilful flatterer is a most delightful companion, if you can keep him all to yourself, his taste becomes very doubtful when he takes to complimenting other people.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Flattery
Once upon a time—of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve—old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Christmas
I believe no satirist could breathe this air. If another Juvenal or Swift could rise up among us tomorrow, he would be hunted down. If you have any knowledge of our literature, and can give me the name of any man, American born and bred, who has anatomized our follies as a people, and not as this or that party; and who has escaped the foulest and most brutal slander, the most inveterate hatred and intolerant pursuit; it will be a strange name in my ears, believe me.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Cynicism
All of us have wonders hidden in our breasts, only needing circumstances to evoke them.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Confidence
“Out upon merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer… If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ upon his lips should be boiled with his won pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Christmas
There is no substitute for thoroughgoing, ardent and sincere earnestness.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Men, Sincerity
There is a wisdom of the head, and… a wisdom of the heart.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Wisdom
Black are the brooding clouds and troubled the deep waters, when the Sea of Thought, first heaving from a calm, gives up its Dead
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Weather
“Somehow he [Tim] gets thoughtful sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant for them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.”
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Christmas
Mr. Tulkinghorn sits at one of the open windows, enjoying a bottle of old port. Though a hard-grained man, close, dry, and silent, he can enjoy old wine with the best. He has a priceless bin of port in some artful cellar under the Fields, which is one of his many secrets. When he dines alone in chambers, as he has dined to-day, and has his bit of fish and his steak or chicken brought in from the coffee-house, he descends with a candle to the echoing regions below the deserted mansion, and, heralded by the remote reverberation of thundering doors, comes gravely back, encircled by an earthy atmosphere and carrying a bottle from which he pours a radiant nectar, two score and ten years old, that blushes in the glass to find itself so famous, and fills the whole room with the fragrance of southern grapes.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Wine
There is probably a smell of roasted chestnuts and other good comfortable things all the time, for we are telling Winter Stories – Ghost Stories, or more shame for us – round the Christmas fire; and we have never stirred, except to draw a little nearer to it.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Winter
I revere the memory of Mr. F. as an estimable man and most indulgent husband, only necessary to mention Asparagus and it appeared or to hint at any little delicate thing to drink and it came like magic in a pint bottle; it was not ecstasy but it was comfort.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Marriage, Husbands
He had but one eye and the pocket of prejudice runs in favor of two.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Eyes
The suspense—the fearful, acute suspense, of standing idly by while the life of one we dearly love is trembling in the balance; the racking thoughts that crowd upon the mind, and make the heart beat violently, and the breath come thick; the desperate anxiety “to be doing something” to relieve the pain or lessen the danger which we have no power to alleviate; and the sinking of soul which the sad sense of our helplessness produces,—what tortures can equal these, and what reflections or efforts can, in the full tide and fever of the time, allay them.
—Charles Dickens
My hair stands on end at the cost and charges of these boys. Why was I ever a father! Why was my father ever a father.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Children
The men who learn endurance, are they who call the whole world, brother.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Endurance
Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, it is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy that we can scarcely mark their progress.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Nature, Miscellaneous, Change
Let us be moral. Let us contemplate existence.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Existence
A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that everyone of those darkly clustered houses encloses it’s own secret that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of it’s imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Humanity, Reflection, Secrets
Father Time is not always a hard parent, and, though he tarries for none of his children, often lays his hand lightly upon those who have used him well; making them old men and women inexorably enough, but leaving their hearts and spirits young and in full vigor. With such people the gray head is but the impression of the old fellow’s hand in giving them his blessing, and every wrinkle but a notch in the quiet calendar of a well-spent life.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Age
There is a passion for hunting something deeply implanted in the human breast.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Hunting
There is nothing truer than physiognomy, taken in connection with manner.
—Charles Dickens
Philosophers are only men in armor after all.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Philosophy
Pride is one of the seven deadly sins; but it cannot be the pride of a mother in her children, for that is a compound of two cardinal virtues—faith and hope.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Faith, Hope
A wailing, rushing sound, which shook the walls as though a giant’s hand were on them; then a hoarse roar, as if the sea had risen; then such a whirl and tumult that the air seemed mad; and then, with a lengthened howl, the waves of wind swept on.
—Charles Dickens
The world, is a conventional phrase, which being interpreted, signifies all the rascality in it.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: World
Oh the nerves, the nerves; the mysteries of this machine called man! Oh the little that unhinges it, poor creatures that we are.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Mental Illness, Worry
Every man, however obscure, however far removed from the general recognition, is one of a group of men impressible for good, and impressible for evil, and it is in the nature of things that he cannot really improve himself without in some degree improving other men.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Improvement
Vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Virtue, Vice
Its very strange, said Mr. Dick that I never can get that quite right; I never can make that perfectly clear.
—Charles Dickens
I never could have done what I have done without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one subject at a time.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Habits
I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don’t trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Crime
It’s my old girl that advises. She has the head. But I never own to it before her. Discipline must be maintained.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Wives, Marriage
External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Weather
Let us be merry, said Mr. Pecksniff.
—Charles Dickens
With affection beaming in one eye, and calculation shining out of the other.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Hypocrisy
Alas! how few of nature’s faces there are to gladden us with their beauty!—The cares, and sorrows, and hungerings of the world change them, as they change hearts; and it is only when the passions sleep and have lost their hold forever that the troubled clouds pass off, and leave heaven’s surface clear.—It is a common thing for the countenances of the dead, even in that fixed and rigid state, to subside into the long forgotten expression of infancy, and settle into the very look of early life.—So calm, so peaceful do they grow again, that those who knew them in their happy childhood, kneel by the coffin’s side in awe, and see the angels even upon earth.
—Charles Dickens
If the law supposes that, said Mr. Bumble, the law is a assa idiot. If thats the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is that his eye may be opened by experienceby experience.
—Charles Dickens
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