Charles Dickens

Charles John Huffam Dickens (Landport, Portsmouth, February 7, 1812-Gads Hill Place, June 9, 1870) was an English writer. He created some of the best known fictional characters in the world and is considered by many to be the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His books enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, and by the 20th century , critics and scholars had recognized Dickens as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are still widely read today and are regularly adapted for the theater.

Dickens has been praised by many of his fellow writers, from Leo Tolstoy to George Orwell, G. K. Chesterton, and Tom Wolfe, for his realism, comedy, prose style, unique characterizations, and social criticism. However, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf complained about his lack of psychological depth, his weak writing, and his sentimentality.

The term Dickensian is used to describe something reminiscent of Dickens and his works, such as poor social conditions or comically repulsive characters.

Biography

Early Years

Charles Dickens was the son of John Dickens (1786-1851), a clerk in the Navy Clerk's Office at the arsenal in Portsmouth Harbor, and his wife Elizabet Barrow (1789-1863). In 1814 the family moved to London, to Somerset House, 10 Norfolk Street. When the future writer was five years old, the family moved to Chatham, Kent. His mother was middle class and his father was always in debt, due to his excessive penchant for extravagance. Charles did not receive any education until the age of nine, a fact that his critics would later reproach him for, considering his training excessively self-taught. At this age, after attending a school in Rome Lane, he studied culture at the school of William Gile, an Oxford graduate. He spent his time outside his house, reading voraciously. He showed a particular fondness for picaresque novels, such as The Adventures of Roderick Random and The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle by Tobias Smollett, and Tom Jones by Henry Fielding. This would be his favorite writer. He also read adventure novels like Robinson Crusoe and Don Quixote de la Mancha . In 1823, he lived with his family in London, at 16 Bayham Street, Camden Town, then one of the poorer suburbs of the city. Although his early years seem to have been an idyllic time, he described himself as a "very small child and not particularly well cared for." He would also speak of his extreme pathos and his photographic memory of people and events, which helped him translate reality into fiction.

Her life changed profoundly when her father was sued for non-payment of his debts and imprisoned in the Marshalsea Debtors Prison. Most of the family moved to live with Mr. Dickens in prison, a possibility then established by law, which allowed the family of the defaulter to share his cell. Charles was welcomed into a house in Little College Street, run by Mrs. Roylance, and came on Sundays to visit his father in prison.

At twelve, the future novelist was considered old enough to start working, and so began his working life, ten-hour days at Warren's boot-blacking factory , a shoe polish factory, located near the current London Charing Cross railway station. This period of his life was spent sticking labels on cans of shoes polish (shoe polish); he earned six shillings a week. With this money, he had to pay for his lodging and helped the family, most of which lived with his father, who remained incarcerated.

After a few months, his family was released from Marshalsea Prison, but their financial situation did not improve until some time later, when Charles's maternal grandmother died and his father received an inheritance of £250. Her mother did not immediately remove Charles from the company, which was owned by relatives of hers. Dickens never forgot his mother's determination to keep him at the factory. These experiences marked his life as a writer: he devoted a large part of his work to denouncing the deplorable conditions under which the proletarian classes survived. In his novel David Copperfield , judged to be his most autobiographical, he wrote: "I received no advice, no support, no encouragement, no consolation, no assistance of any kind, from anyone who could remember me.". How I wanted to go to heaven!"

First stage

In May 1827, Dickens began working as a clerk at the law firm of Ellis & Blackmore and after a time as a court reporter.

In 1828 he began working as a reporter for the Doctor's Commons and later became a parliamentary chronicler for the True Sun. Around this time he became interested in the London theater scene, enrolling in acting classes, but on the day of the casting, he suffered from the flu and was unable to attend, thus extinguishing his dreams of being a theater actor.

In 1834 he was hired by the Morning Chronicle as a political journalist, reporting on parliamentary debates, and traveling across the country to cover electoral campaigns. In 1836 his articles in the form of literary sketches that had been appearing in different publications since 1833, were published as the first volume of Sketches by Boz and which gave way in March of that same year to the publication of the first installments of The Pickwick Club Posthumous Papers. Subsequently he continued to contribute to and edit journals for much of his life.

On April 2, 1836, he married Catherine Thompson Hogarth (1816-1879) and took up residence in Bloomsbury. They had ten children: Charles Culliford Boz Dickens (1837-1896), Mary Dickens (1838-1896), Kate Macready Dickens (1839-1929), Walter Landor Dickens (1841-1863), Francis Jeffrey Dickens (1844-1886), Alfred D'Orsay Tennyson Dickens (1845-1912), Sydney Smith Haldimand Dickens (1847-1872), Henry Fielding Dickens (1849-1933), Dora Annie Dickens (1850-1851) and Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens (1852-1902).

In 1836 he accepted the job of editor of Bentley's Miscellany, which he would hold until 1839, when he fell out with the owner. Two other newspapers to which Dickens was a regular contributor were Household Words and All the Year Round. In 1842, he traveled with his wife to the United States, a fact that he briefly described in American Travel Notes and which also served as the basis for some of the episodes of Martin Chuzzlewit . Although soon after he showed an interest in Christian Unitarianism, Dickens would remain an Anglican for the rest of his life. Around 1849, Dickens would write The Life of Our Lord Lord), a short book that addressed the life of Jesus Christ in simple language and was written with the purpose of instilling the Christian religion in his children. Influenced by his Protestant upbringing, he rejected the denominations of Catholicism and evangelicalism, and critically dealt with the hypocrisy of religious institutions and philosophies, spiritualism which he considered a departure from the true spirit of Christianity. Dickens not only professed to be a Christian, but, in the words of his son Henry Fielding Dickens, would be described as a man of "deep religious convictions". Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky would refer to him as "that great Christian writer".

Dickens's writings were extremely popular in his day and were widely read. In 1856, his popularity enabled him to purchase Gad's Hill Place. This large house located in Higham, Kent, had a special meaning for the writer, since as a child he had walked near it and had dreamed of inhabiting it. The place was also the place where some scenes from the first part of Shakespeare's Henry IV take place, a literary connection that pleased Dickens.

He saw nine installments published in 1836, and the remaining eleven in 1837, of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. His next work was Oliver Twist (1837-1838) a truly autobiographical tale and was serialized over two months. This work was followed by Nicholas Nickleby (1838–1840) and The Antique Shop (1840–1841), where he recounted the misfortunes of little Nelly, with passages inspired by the recent passing of his seventeen-year-old sister-in-law Mary Hogarth, whom Dickens adored. The play was a great success in England and America.

Thanks to the works he published, Dickens gained great prestige. In 1841 he was named an adoptive son by the city of Edinburgh and traveled to the United States, where he was rejected by the society of this country due to the lectures he gave and the novel Notes from America, against slavery. and that Dickens had personally experienced in his childhood. Despite this, he reconciled with the public after the publication of A Christmas Carol in 1843.

His novel Dombey and Son (“Dombey and son”, 1846–1848) meant a change in his method of work: he went from improvisation to complete planning, relying on writing in the mastery that he achieved in the management of novelistic resources. In 1849 he founded the weekly Household Words, where he disseminated writings by little-known authors and in which he published two of his most sublime works: Bleak House (Bleak House, 1852-1853), and Hard Times (Difficult Times, 1854).

By that point he was already considered the great social novelist. Subjected as he was to a heavy workload to meet the demands of his readers, Dickens soon fell into a crisis that led him to break with his publishers, after demanding more remuneration, a request that was denied. After that, Dickens began a series of trips to Italy, publishing Italian Pictures, Switzerland and France, where he met Alexandre Dumas and a young Jules Verne, as well as admiring Parisian society. On his return to England, forced by new economic needs, he extended his activity to other fields: he organized theatrical performances, founded the Daily News, acted as an actor and began to give lectures, such as the ones he gave on the copyright, defense of prostitutes and condemnation of the death penalty, very much in vogue in London as entertainment for the people.

His great best seller was David Copperfield , which sold up to 100,000 copies in a short time. He was also the first writer to use the word detective in his novels.

Second stage

Dickens portrait.

About 1850 Dickens's health had declined; this change was aggravated by the death of his father, a daughter and his sister Fanny. Dickens separated from his wife in 1858. In the Victorian era, divorce was unthinkable, particularly for famous people like him. Nevertheless, he continued to support her and her home for the next 20 years, until the day she passed away. Although they initially lived happily together, Catherine did not seem to share the inordinate energy that Dickens had in the least. Her job of watching over her ten children and the pressure of living with a world famous novelist certainly wasn't helping. Catherine's sister Georgina moved in to help her, but rumors were circulating that Charles was romantically involved with her sister-in-law. An indication of the marital crisis occurred when, in 1855, he went to meet his first love, Mary Beadnell. Maria was also married at this time, but she had changed greatly from Dickens's romantic memory of her. From then on, the change in Charles Dickens's character was so remarkable that several of his friends declared that they did not recognize him as the person they had known. Despite everything, Dickens continued to write and give lectures and took refuge at the home of his friend Wilkie Collins (the creator of the mystery genre). They came to write stories together and recommended ideas for their respective novels. In 1859 he published A Tale of Two Cities . In 1863 he created The Arts Club.

On June 9, 1865, while returning from France to see Ellen Ternan, Dickens suffered an accident, the famous Staplehurst rail wreck, in which the first seven carriages of the train fell off a bridge that was being repaired. The only first-class carriage that did not fall was the one where Dickens was. The novelist spent much time tending to the wounded and dying before rescuers arrived. Before leaving, he remembered the unfinished manuscript of Our Mutual Friend, and returned to the carriage only to retrieve it. Typical of Dickens, he would later use this ordeal to write his short ghost story The Signalman, in which the protagonist has a premonition of a railway crash.

Dickens managed to evade the crash investigation because, as is now known, he was traveling that day with Ellen Ternan and her mother, which could cause a scandal. Ellen, an actress, had been Dickens's companion since his marriage ended, and, as he met her in 1857, was probably the ultimate reason for his separation from her. She continued to be his companion, rather his mistress, until the day of his death. The extent of the affair was unknown until the 1939 publication of Dickens and His Daughter, a book about the author's intrafamilial relationship with his daughter Kate. Kate Dickens worked with Gladys Storey on the book before her death in 1929, and claimed that Dickens and Ternan had a son who died in infancy, although there is no concrete evidence to support her claims.

Dickens, though uninjured, never fully recovered from the Staplehurst accident. His prolific pen was dedicated to completing Our Mutual Friend and beginning The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which remained unfinished in its last third, and whose unknown end gave rise to countless hypothesis. Much of his time was spent in public readings of his best-loved novels. Dickens was fascinated with the theater as an escape from the real world, and theaters and theater audiences feature in Nicholas Nickleby. The traveling shows were extremely popular, and on December 2, 1867 Dickens gave the first public reading from him in the United States, in a New York theater. The effort and passion that he put into these readings with individual voices for his characters is something that perhaps also contributed to his death.

He continued to write for Old Year Magazine until his death. Shortly after he was received by Queen Victoria I, who was a great reader of his works.

In 1869 Dickens agreed to chair the Birmingham and Midland Institute, thus becoming its 16th president.

Five years after the aforementioned accident, on June 9, 1870, he died the day after suffering a stroke, without having regained consciousness. Against his desire to be buried in Rochester Cathedral (the one close to his home), "cheaply, without ostentation and strictly private", he was buried in the so-called "Poets' Corner" of Westminster Abbey, although care was taken to respect his desire for privacy. A printed epitaph circulated at his death stating that he "was a sympathizer of the poor, the miserable, and the oppressed; and with his death the world has lost one of the greatest English writers." Dickens stipulated that no monument be erected in his honor; the only life-size statue of him dates from 1981, made by Francis Edwin Elwell, which is located in Clark Park, Philadelphia, in the United States. His great dream was to be free and he achieved it by being a writer.

His novel Oliver Twist has been brought to the big screen on numerous occasions:

• See: Oliver Twist (disambiguation).

Literary style

Dickens's style is flowery and poetic, with a strong comic edge. His satires on the snobbery of the British aristocracy—he called one of his characters "The Noble Refrigerator"—are often popular. Comparisons of orphans with shareholders or diners with furniture are some of his most acclaimed ironies.

Characters

Scene of Christmastale.

Dickens has been called an author whose characters are among the most memorable and creative in English literature—if not exclusively because of their unusual quirks, then certainly because of their names. Characters like Ebenezer Scrooge, Fagin, Mrs. Gamp, David Copperfield, Charles Darnay, Oliver Twist, Micawber, Pecksniff, Miss Havisham, Wackford Squeers and many others are so well known that one might even believe that they have lives outside of their novels. and that their stories would continue with other authors. Dickens loved the style of the 18th century, the Gothic romance, and even took it as a game - Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey was a well-known parody - and while some are grotesque, his eccentricities don't usually overshadow their stories. One of the best drawn characters in his novels is London itself. From the bars on the outskirts of the city to the banks of the Thames, every aspect of the British capital is described by someone who truly loved it and spent many hours walking its streets.

Serial novels

Most of Dickens's masterpieces were written as monthly or weekly installments in periodicals such as Master Humphrey's Clock and Household Words, later being reprinted in books. These installments made the stories cheaper and more accessible. American supporters even waited in New York harbors yelling over the crowds of an arriving ship "Is little Nell dead?" Part of Dickens's great talent was incorporating his serialized style with a coherent ending to the novel. The monthly issues of it were illustrated by, among others, "Phiz" (pen name Hablot Browne). Among his most famous works are Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, Bleak House, Nicholas Nickleby, The Pickwick Club Posthumous Papers and A Christmas Carol.

His way of conceiving the characters can be understood by analyzing his relationship with the illustrators. Dickens worked very closely with the illustrators: at first he gave them a prospectus for the job, making sure the characters and settings were just as he envisioned them. By reading the correspondence between the author and the illustrator, Dickens's intentions can be better understood, since what was hidden in his art is fully explained in these letters. Another fact that the letters reveal is that the interests of the reader did not always coincide with those of the author. A great example of this appears in the monthly novel Oliver Twist. In one episode of it, Dickens got Oliver involved in a robbery. This installment concluded when Oliver was shot. Readers estimated that they would be forced to wait only a month to find out how the protagonist of that shot had turned out, but Dickens did not reveal what happened to young Oliver in the next issue, eager readers had to wait two months to find out. if the child would live This shows how the desire of an involved reader —to know what had happened— does not coincide with the author's intention, which was to extend the intrigue.

Another important effect of the episodic style was exposure to the opinions of its readers. Since Dickens didn't write his chapters long before publication, he could check the public reaction and change the story depending on those reactions. An example of this process can be seen in his weekly deliveries to the Old Antique Store, which is the story of a chase. In this novel, Nell and her grandfather are on the run from the villain, Quilp. The progress of the novel follows the gradual success of the persecution. As Dickens wrote and published the weekly installments, her good friend John Forster pointed out to Dickens, "You know you're going to have to kill her, right?" The reason for this ending can be explained by a brief analysis of the difference between the structure of a comedy and that of a tragedy. In a comedy, the action covers a "you think they're going to lose, you think they're going to lose, they win" sequence. In a tragedy it is: "You think they will win, you think they will win, they lose." As seen, the dramatic conclusion of the story is implicit in the novel. Thus, when Dickens wrote the novel in the form of a tragedy, the unfortunate denouement was a foregone conclusion. If he hadn't wanted his heroine to lose, he shouldn't have completed the dramatic structure. Dickens admitted that his friend Forster was right, and in the finale, little Nell dies. Dickens also admitted that he did not want to kill Nell, but he was a novelist and had to complete the structure of the novel.

Social criticism

Charles Dickens for Frith.

Dickens's novels were, among other things, works of social criticism. He was a fierce critic of poverty and the social stratification of Victorian society. Through his works, Dickens maintained an empathy for the common man and a skepticism for the bourgeois family. Dickens's second novel, Oliver Twist (1839), was responsible for the cleanup of present-day London slums that was the basis of the story Jacob's Island. Furthermore, with the character of a tragic prostitute, Nancy, Dickens "humanized" such women for readers, women who were regarded as "unlucky," immoral inherent victims of the economics of the Victorian system. Bleak House and Little Dorrit produced extensive critiques of the Victorian institutional apparatus: the endless Chancery court litigation that destroyed the lives of people in The desolate house and the double attack on Little Dorrit with the patent inefficiency and corruption of the offices and with the irregular speculation of the markets.

Literary Techniques

Dickens often used romanticized characters and scenes with a highly sentimental touch in contrast to his caricatures and the terrible social truths he revealed. Little Nell's lengthy death scene in the Old Antique Shop (1841) was greeted as unbelievable and moving by readers of its day, but was seen as ridiculously sentimental by Oscar Wilde. In 1903 Chesterton said, on the same subject: "It is not the death of little Nell, but the life of the little girl, that I object to."

In Oliver Twist, Dickens provides readers with an idealized portrait of an unrealistically good young man, whose values are never subverted by brutal orphanages or forced interventions in a gang of petty pickpockets. Also his later novels focus on idealized characters (such as Esther Summerson in Bleak House and Amy Dorrit in Little Dorrit ). This idealism serves only to highlight Dickens's aim to move with social criticism of him. Most of his novels are related to social realism, focusing on mechanisms of social control that direct people's lives (for example on industrial networks in Tough Times and hypocritical and exclusive class codes in Our mutual friend).

Dickens also employs incredible coincidences (for example, Oliver Twist turns out to be the long-lost nephew of a socialite family who randomly rescues him from a dangerous group of pickpockets). These coincidences are common in the 18th century —the century of picaresque novels (such as Tom Jones by Henry Fielding), which Dickens quite enjoyed. For Dickens this was an indication of a humanitarian Christianity that led him to believe that good always wins out in the end, even in unexpected ways. Viewing this from a biographical context, Dickens's life, contrary to expectations, led him from a heartbroken childhood forced to work long hours in a boot factory at the age of 12 (when his father was in prison for debts) to his status as England's most popular novelist at the age of 27.

Autobiographical elements

All authors incorporate biographical elements into their fiction, but with Dickens this is very noticeable, even as he feared hiding what he considered his shameful, humble past.

David Copperfield is one of the clearest autobiographies, but the Bleak House scenes of endless court cases and legal arguments could only have come from a journalist who had to report them. Dickens's own family was sent to prison for poverty, a common theme in many of his books, and the detailed description of life in Marshalea prison in Little Dorrit is due to Dickens's own Dickens' experiences in that institution.

Little Nell, in The Old Curiosity Shop, is a thought representing her own sister-in-law; Nicholas Nickleby's father and Wilkins Micawber are surely the author's own father; just as Mrs. Nickleby and Mrs. Micawber are similar to his mother, Pip's snobbish nature from Great Expectations also has some affinity with the same author. Dickens may have drawn childhood experiences from him, but he was also ashamed of them and would not reveal that his own narratives came from the dirt.

Very few knew the details of his life until six years after his death, when John Forster published a biography on which Dickens had contributed. A dark past in Victorian times could tarnish reputations, as well as some of his characters, and this was perhaps Dickens's own fear.

Works

Novels

• The Pustumos Club Papers Pickwick (1836–1837)
• Oliver Twist (1837–1839)
• Nicholas Nickleby (1838–1839)
• The antique shop (1840–1841)
• Barnaby Rudge (1841)
• Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-1844)
• Little Dombey (1846–1848). Translator: M. Early. Alba Editorial, 2020, ISBN: 97884-90656952.
• David Copperfield (1849–1850). Translator: M. Salís. Alba Editorial, 2012. ISBN: 97884-84286783
• Desolate house (1852-1853)
• Difficult times (1854)
• Little Dorrit (1855–1857). Translators: Ismael Attrache and Carmen Francí, Alba Editorial, 2012.
• History of two cities (1859)
• Great hopes (1860–1861). Translator: R. Berenguer, Alba Editorial, 2020. ISBN: 97884-90657294
• Our common friend (1864–1865). Translator: D. Alou. Debolsillo, 2011, ISBN-13: 978-8499088006.
• The mystery of Edwin Drood (1870; inconclusive)

Stories

• Christmastale (1843)
• The bells (1844)
• The household cricket (1845)
• The Battle of Life (1846)
• The hechized (1848)
• Intrepid men (1853)
• A house to rent (1858)
• The guard (1866)

Reception

Scholars and writers such as George Gissing and G. K. Chesterton defended and hailed his mastery of the English language as unrivaled, his characters as unforgettable, and to a great extent his profound social sensitivity. However, she also received criticism from important readers—George Henry Lewes, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf among them—who blamed certain flaws in her works, such as effusive sentimentality, unreal events, and grotesque characters.

Legacy

Seal in the "The Centenary Edition of The Works of Charles Dickens in 36 Volumes".

Charles Dickens was a well-known personality and his novels were very popular during his lifetime. His first finished novel, The Pickwick Club Posthumous Papers (1837), brought him immediate fame that continued throughout his career. He maintained a high quality throughout his writing and while he rarely strayed from his typical Dickensonian method of always trying to write a great "story" in a conventional manner (the double narrative of Bleak House is a notable exception), experimenting with numerous themes, characterizations and genres. Some of these experiments were more successful than others, and public appreciation of his work varied over time. He was usually happy to give his readers what they wanted and the monthly or weekly publication of his work in episodes meant that the book could change as the story unfolded according to the public's taste. A good example of this is the American episodes of Martin Chuzzlewit , which were posted as Dickens's response at a lower price to his early chapters. In Our Mutual Friend the inclusion of Riaj's character was a positive portrayal of a Jewish character, after the one he criticized with Fagin in Oliver Twist .

His popularity waned somewhat after his death, but he remains one of the best known and most widely read of British writers. At least 180 films and adaptations for television based on Dickens's works confirm the aforementioned success. Many of his works were adapted for the stage during his lifetime and as early as 1913 a silent film of The Pickwick Club Posthumous Papers was made.

His characters were often so memorable that they seemed to have taken on a life of their own. Gamp became a slang expression for a parasol after the character Mrs. Gamp, and Pickwickian, Pecksniffian, and Gradgrind entered dictionaries because of Dickens' portrayals of them as quixotic, hypocritical, or callous. Sam Weller, the irreverent and giddy valet of The Pickwick Club Posthumous Papers, was an early superstar, perhaps better known than his early author. This also happens in his best-known novel A Christmas Carol , with new adaptations almost every day. It is also the most filmed of the Dickens stories; many versions date from the beginnings of cinema. This simple self-righteous tale with its theme of redemption, for many, sums up the true meaning of Christmas and dwarfs all other stories; in addition, it shows archetypal figures (Scrooge, Tiny Tim, the ghosts of Christmas) of the western conscience. A Christmas Carol was written by Dickens in an attempt to prevent a financial disaster resulting from poor sales of Martin Chuzzlewit. Years later, Dickens would share that he was always "deeply affected" by writing A Christmas Carol and the novel rejuvenated his career as a renowned author.

At a time when Britain was the world's greatest political and economic power, Dickens highlighted the lives of the forgotten poor at the heart of empire. Through his journalism he campaigned on specific issues — like hygiene and workhouses — but his fiction was probably the most powerful thing in changing public opinion about class inequalities. He then described the exploitation and repression of the poor and condemned the official public institutions that allowed such abuses to take place. His most strident indictment of these conditions is in Tough Times (1854), his only novel dealing with the working class. In this work, he uses both virulence and satire to illustrate how this marginalized social stratum was dubbed "Hands" by businessmen, that is, that they were not really people, but just appendages to the machines they operated.

His writings inspired others, particularly journalists and political figures, to put these issues of class oppression on their agendas. For example, the prison scenes in Little Dorrit and The Pickwick Club Posthumous Papers were early instigators in the destruction of the Marshalsea and Fleet Prison. In the words of Karl Marx, Dickens and other novelists of Victorian England "...exhibited to the world more social and political truths than were uttered by professional politicians, publicists and moralists combined...". The exceptional popularity of his novels, including those with themes of social opposition (Bleak House, 1853, Little Dorrit, 1857, Our Mutual Friend, 1865) underscored not only his near-natural ability to create compelling stories and unforgettable characters, but also ensured that public justice and social issues that were normally ignored were addressed.

His fiction, with continuous descriptions of English life in the 19th century, has come to symbolize accurately and anachronistically the Victorian society (1837–1901) as uniformly "Dickensian" when, in fact, her novels chronicle the period from 1770 to 1860. In the decade following her death in 1870, more intense philosophical and social pessimism took hold. in British fiction, these themes contrasted with the religious faith that accompanied even the most bleak of Dickens's novels. Later novelists from Victorian England such as Thomas Hardy and George Grissing were influenced by Dickens, but their works exhibited a lack of religious belief and portrayed characters immersed in social forces (mainly those of the lower class) who were destined for a more tragic end. beyond your control.

Novelists continue to be influenced by their books; for example, writers such as Anne Rice, Tom Wolfe, and John Irving show direct connections to Dickens. Comedian James Finn Garner even wrote a "politically correct" version of A Christmas Carol. Either way, Dickens stands today as a brilliant innovator and sometimes flawed novelist whose stories and characters have become not only literary archetypes but also part of the public imagination.

Movies

In 2017 the film The Man Who Invented Christmas was made, based on the life of Dickens and his creative process while writing the story A Christmas Carol. It featured the participation of Dan Stevens, Christopher Plummer and Jonathan Pryce, among other well-known actors.