CHARLES DICKENS. — English novelist, b. at Portsea on 7 Feb. 1812, d. near Chatham-Rochester on 9 June 1870. The first harsh years of his life are recounted in novel form in what is considered his masterpiece, *David Copperfield* (1849–50). Self-taught, he began his career as a writer in journalism and definitively won over the public with *The Pickwick Papers* (1836).
Living in the post-Napoleonic period, in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, his works (of which the major ones number about twenty) reflect all the ferment that tended toward the radical reform of every sector of society and the renewal of all institutions, from charitable ones to educational ones, from the administration of justice to the problems of labor, juvenile delinquency and adults, etc. The movement for the freedom of the Catholic Church in England, which was maturing at that time, found a place especially in his historical novel (he wrote only two) entitled *Barnaby Rudge* (1841), and the Gordon Riots against the parliamentary plans for Catholic emancipation at the end of the 18th century. Christianity enters Dickens’s novels above all as a general atmosphere of charity toward one’s neighbor. *The Life of Christ* (*The History of our Saviour Jesus Christ*, 1849), written as a narrative for his children, has no literary value.