The world of Charles Dick­ens was the world of nine­teenth cen­tury Eng­land, full of extra­or­di­nary and shock­ing con­trasts. Boys with bare feet swept the snow away for ladies who thought it immod­est to show an ankle. Men were hard­work­ing, women pure, and chil­dren inno­cent, but these were the val­ues of the mid­dle class, not of the filthy slums, where chil­dren stole, girls turned to pros­ti­tu­tion from hunger and des­per­a­tion, and the only refuge of the sick and the unem­ployed was the inhu­man and degrad­ing workhouse.

Yet Eng­land as a whole was extremely wealthy. Dick­ens’ own life reflected these con­trasts: it was a fas­ci­nat­ing mix­ture of the respectable and the shady. He became suc­cess­ful and pros­per­ous, but as a boy he had slunk through the gates of a debtor’s prison to visit his father, lodged alone in the mean back streets of Cam­den Town, and worked in a fac­tory. Though his nov­els empha­sised the sanc­tity of the home, in middle-​age he deserted his wife, the mother of his nine chil­dren, and took up with a young actress.

With enor­mous energy Charles Dick­ens man­aged to hold all these ele­ments together and weld them into the fab­ric of his writ­ing. In this cel­e­bra­tory vol­ume Charles Mosley, a spe­cial­ist in the his­tory of the period, traces the course of Dick­ens’ life and the devel­op­ment of his writ­ing, from the cheery fun of Pick­wick Papers and A Christ­mas Carol, through the social indig­na­tion of Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nick­leby, to deeper nov­els like Great Expec­ta­tions and Lit­tle Dor­rit.

• Detailed appraisals of his major novels
• A look at Charles Dick­ens and his time
• Cov­er­age of his short sto­ries, poetry, essays and plays
• A time­line of Charles Dick­ens’ life