Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era and perhaps the most famous English novelist of all time. He once went so far as to describe himself as “an amazing man,” and it is true that he was exceedingly gifted. In fact, his creative powers were matched only by his ambition. He is undoubtedly the most “English” of authors after William Shakespeare, meticulously capturing the lives, locales, and affairs of his native land at a time of remarkable societal change. He invented characters that seem to leap off the page. They live on in our imaginations long after the last leaf is turned. His popularity and influence were not only unmatched in his day but absolutely groundbreaking, altering the very essence of the novel. Aside from amusing his readers–something he never failed to do–Dickens had a real impact on the world around him. Energized by ideas of social reform, he was both a humanistic novelist and a true humanitarian. He supported the abolition of slavery and founded a home for “fallen” women, Urania College in London, with the help of heiress Angela Burdett Coutts. Novels such as Oliver Twist are works of fierce social commentary that helped to alter public opinion, thus steering the course of legislative reform. As novelist Jane Smiley wrote in her biography of the author, Dickens “never forgot that his fame gave him an unusual opportunity to comment upon and influence political events.”Born into a family of modest means in 1812, when Napoleon still ruled over much of Europe, Dickens would be greeted with unprecedented accomplishment as a novelist in a century that saw the British Empire attain its greatest reach, spanning the globe and dominating international commerce. The Industrial Revolution swung into full force in England, producing magnificent wealth but also horrendous and even harmful conditions for workers. The Victorian era roughly coincided with the Pax Britannica, or Peace of Britain–the era between Wellington’s triumph over Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815 and the first shots of World War I in 1914–when Britain remained free of the threat of outside invasion. Railways and popular newspapers changed the very fabric of daily life for the English, and the Elementary Education Act of 1870 promised literacy for all. It was an era of rapid political and scientific adjustment unseen in earlier centuries: Charles Darwin embarked on his groundbreaking scientific travels on the HMS Beagle in 1831, and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto in 1848 (Marx moved to London the following year and remained there for the rest of his life).With the first of the Reform Acts (measures to enfranchise new voters) in 1832 and Queen Victoria’s ascension to the throne five years later, the Victorian era began in earnest, bringing with it a bewildering combination of affluence and deprivation, progress and reaction. London swelled as agrarian workers poured in to find work, growing from roughly one million inhabitants in 1800 to more than six million by the end of the century. Buildings were black with soot from coal-fire stoves, and streets were filthy. Raw sewage spewed into the river Thames, which flows directly through the city. In fact, Dickens’s London would appear to us a sprawling third-world city, crammed with beggars, plagued by crime, and fouled by pollution. Graveyards overflowed, and bodies were buried on top of one another. Contemporary accounts describe the stench as horrific. As Dickens biographer Peter Ackroyd has written, “If a late twentieth-century person were suddenly to find himself in a tavern or house of the period, he would be literally sick–sick with the smells, sick with the food, sick with the atmosphere around him.”

Charles Dickens Collection – Charles Dickens Set – Great Expectations – Oliver Twist – David Copperfield – A Tale of Two Cities – A Christmas Carol – Hard Times – Bleak House (Annotated)

Charles Dickens Collection – Charles Dickens Set – Great Expectations – Oliver Twist – David Copperfield – A Tale of Two Cities – A Christmas Carol – Hard Times – Bleak House (Annotated) PDF

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