Dickens, Charles

DICKENS, CHARLES. - English novelist, b. at Portsea on 7 Feb. 1812, d. near Chatham-Rochester on 9 June 1870. The early hard years of his life are narrated to us in the form of a novel in what is considered his masterpiece, David Copperfield (1849-50). Self-taught, he began his career as a writer as a journalist, 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) mirror all the ferment that tended toward the radical reform of every sector of society and the renewal of all institutions, from charitable ones to scholastic ones, from the administration of justice to the problems of labor, of juvenile and adult delinquency, etc. The movement for the freedom of the Catholic Church in England, which was maturing in those days, found a place especially in his historical novel (he wrote only two) entitled: Barnaby Rudge (1841), where the first popular uprisings (the "Gordon Riots") against the parliamentary proposals for the emancipation of Catholics at the end of the 18th century are described. Christianity enters D.'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.

Alberto Castelli