DICKENS, CHARLES. — English novelist, born at Portsea on 7 February 1812, died near Chatham-Rochester on 9 June 1870. The harsh early years of his life are recounted to us in novel form in what is considered his masterpiece, David Copperfield (1849–50). Self-taught, he began his writing career as a journalist and definitively won over the public with the Pickwick Papers (1836).
Living in the post-Napoleonic period, amid the Industrial Revolution, his works (of which the major ones number around twenty) reflect all the ferment tending toward the radical reform of every sector of society and the renewal of all institutions, from charitable and educational institutions to the administration of justice and the problems of labor, juvenile and adult delinquency, etc. The movement for the freedom of the Catholic Church in England, which was coming to maturity in those days, found a place above all in his historical novel (he wrote only two), entitled Barnaby Rudge (1841), in which the first popular uprisings (the “Gordon Riots”) against parliamentary plans for the emancipation of Catholics at the end of the eighteenth century are described. Christianity enters D.’s novels chiefly 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.