Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth in 1812 and grew up between modest comfort and real hardship: at twelve he was sent to work in a boot-blacking factory while his father was in a debtors' prison. He became a parliamentary reporter and then a novelist, and The Pickwick Papers (1836-37) made him famous while he was still in his twenties. Almost all his novels appeared in monthly or weekly parts, which shaped everything about how they are built, and he toured Britain and America giving public readings of his own work. He edited the journals Household Words and All the Year Round, campaigned on poverty, sanitation and education, and travelled constantly. He died in 1870 with The Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished. The tradition and place he wrote from He wrote from London: its courts, offices, streets, river, prisons and the new railway stations. His subject was the ordinary person's exposure to institutions, and his method was reportage sharpened into comedy, then into anger. Genres and style Serialised novels, journalism, ghost stories and Christmas books. His comedy runs on invented names, repeated gestures and voices you can hear; his plots run on coincidence and long-delayed revelations, which is how the serial keeps a reader paying attention for eighteen months. He uses sentiment openly and turns it into social argument. Notable works Oliver Twist (1838); A Christmas Carol (1843); David Copperfield (1850); Bleak House (1853); Hard Times (1854); A Tale of Two Cities (1859); Great Expectations (1861); Our Mutual Friend (1865). What his craft can teach yours Dickens teaches two useful things at once: how to hold a reader across a long arc, and how to make a social point through a person rather than a lecture. Let a minor character have one unforgettable habit, and let the institution that damaged them be visible in a single office or a single bill. Experience Their Writing From the opening of A Tale of Two Cities, published in 1859 and now in the public domain: 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity.' The repetition that would be clumsy in a short poem becomes a drumbeat in a novel about a country splitting in two. What Makes This Writing Special? Dickens introduces a character through one physical habit or one repeated phrase, and by the second appearance that habit has become a small portrait. He lets detail accumulate until a room is not described but remembered, and he paces revelation so that a serial reader could not stay away. His comedy and his anger run on the same sentence. Where to Read More All of Dickens's novels are in the public domain and are held in full by Project Gutenberg; A Christmas Carol is the shortest way into his voice.