DICKENS, CHARLES

born Feb. 7, 1812, Portsmouth, Hampshire, Eng. died June 9, 1870, Gad's Hill, near Chatham, Kent in full Charles John Huffam Dickens English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian era. His many volumes include such works as A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity than had any previous author during his lifetime. Much in his work could appeal to simple and sophisticated, to the poor and to the Queen, and technological developments as well as the qualities of his work enabled his fame to spread worldwide very quickly. His long career saw fluctuations in the reception and sales of individual novels, but none of them was negligible or uncharacteristic or disregarded, and, though he is now admired for aspects and phases of his work that were given less weight by his contemporaries, his popularity has never ceased and his present critical standing is higher than ever before. The most abundantly comic of English authors, he was much more than a great entertainer. The range, compassion, and intelligence of his apprehension of his society and its shortcomings enriched his novels and made him both one of the great forces in 19th-century literature and an influential spokesman of the conscience of his age. Additional reading Bibliographies K.J. Fielding, Charles Dickens (1953); Ada Nisbet, Charles Dickens, in Lionel Stevenson (ed.), Victorian Fiction: A Guide to Research, pp. 44153 (1964, reprinted 1980), a full discussion of materials for Dickens studies and of writings about him in many languages, through 1962; Victorian Fiction: A Second Guide to Research, ed. by George H. Ford, pp. 34113 (1978), covering 196374. See also Philip Collins, A Dickens Bibliography (1970), offprinted from George Watson (ed.), New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, vol. 3, col. 779850 (1969). Reginald C. Churchill (comp.), Bibliography of Dickensian Criticism: 18361974 (1975), a selective, partly annotated bibliography.Most of the manuscripts and proof sheets of the novels are in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Other important collections of manuscripts and letters are in Dickens House, London; the British Museum; New York Public Library; Pierpont Morgan Library, New York City; Free Library of Philadelphia; Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California; the University of Texas Libraries; and Yale University Library. The Dickens Fellowship (Dickens House, London) has branches all over the world and publishes the Dickensian (thrice yearly). Dickens Studies Newsletter (quarterly) and Dickens Studies Annual are published from Carbondale, Illinois, where the Dickens Society is based. Collected editions The New Oxford Illustrated Dickens (194758); and the Clarendon edition, begun in 1966. See also Speeches, ed. by K.J. Fielding (1960); and Public Readings, ed. by Philip Collins (1975). Letters The most complete collection, The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. by Walter Dexter, 3 vol. (1938), is superseded by The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. by Madeline House et al., begun in 1965. See also The Heart of Charles Dickens, As Revealed in His Letters to Angela Burdett-Coutts, ed. by Edgar Johnson (1952, reprinted 1976). Biographies John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, 3 vol. (187274), remains indispensable; though Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, 2 vol. (1952, reprinted 1965), supersedes it. Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, Dickens (1979), is a popular biography; Philip Collins (ed.), Dickens, 2 vol. (1981), contains interviews with and recollections of people who knew him; Fred Kaplan, Dickens and Mesmerism (1975), relates his interest in hypnotism to concerns expressed in his novels; Joseph Gold, Charles Dickens: Radical Moralist (1972), is a discussion of his ethical beliefs. Criticism George R. Gissing, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1898, reissued 1976); G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens (1903, reprinted 1977); George Orwell, Dickens, in Critical Essays, pp. 756 (1946); Edmund Wilson, Dickens: The Two Scrooges, in The Wound and the Bow, pp. 1104 (1941); Humphry House, The Dickens World, 2nd ed. (1942, reissued 1971), an excellent discussion of Dickens and his age; George H. Ford, Dickens and His Readers (1955, reprinted 1974); John E. Butt and Kathleen Tillotson, Dickens at Work (1957, reprinted 1982); J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (1958, reissued 1969), a highly influential critical study; Philip Collins, Dickens and Crime (1962); Robert Garis, The Dickens Theatre (1965); Angus Wilson, The World of Charles Dickens (1970); and Frank R. and Q.D. Leavis, Dickens, the Novelist (1970, reissued 1979). Anthologies of Dickens criticism George H. Ford and L. Lane (eds.), The Dickens Critics (1961, reprinted 1976); Stephen Wall (ed.), Charles Dickens: A Critical Anthology (1970); and Philip Collins (ed.), Dickens, the Critical Heritage (1971), on his critical reception in 183682. Philip Collins The Editors of the Encyclopdia Britannica