Charles Dickens was born on 7 February 1812 in Portsmouth, England. He began his working life as a clerk for a lawyer, then became a freelance and parliamentary reporter before moving on to writing fiction and editing. His final years were marked by illness, and he died of a stroke in 1870. His remains are buried in Westminster Abbey.
During Dickens’ lifetime his novels, though very popular, were not taken seriously as literature, in other words they were not considered “high art”. It was not until 
much later that his work was recognised as having an important place in English literature. Subsequently, Dickens’ work was revered by and influenced diverse writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Leo Tolstoy, Joseph Conrad and Franz Kafka.
Dickens is noted for the satirical wit evident in his novels, and is acclaimed as a social and moral critic with his acute observation and awareness of people and society. His boyhood experience of poverty remained with him all his life, and his criticisms of the social callousness of Victorian society are to be found in many of his works. He is equally known for his cast of memorable characters. Many of Dickens’ novels rely upon moral contrasts in both plot and character, reflected in the symmetry of plot that complements characterisation.
His first publication was a story called “A Dinner at Poplar Walk”, which appeared anonymously in 1833 in the Monthly Magazine. He had more sketches published the following year, and so began his prolific writing career. His major works began to follow shortly after, with Pickwick Papers in 1836, and Oliver Twist in 1837. These, like many of his works, appeared in serial form in periodicals; Oliver Twist began its life in Bentley’s Miscellany under Dickens’ new editorship. He also wrote a series of Christmas Stories, of which A Christmas Carol is the most famous.
Popular in both print and in its many screen adaptations, Oliver Twist is an example of Dickens’ ability to create a web of complex relationships between characters and events. Beginning as the story of a boy in an orphanage who asks for more gruel, the novel develops into Oliver’s quest for happiness and a home, and like many of Dickens’ novels, it has a happy ending. Similar themes are found in David Copperfield (1849), the story of a boy raised by his mother and his nurse, who has a miserable boyhood because of his mother’s bad marriage. Like Oliver, however, he eventually finds domestic bliss.
Other enduring works are A Tale of Two Cities (1859), a story that moves between London and Paris during the French Revolution, and Great Expectations (1860), a novel recently used as a foundation for Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs, a testament to Dickens’ continuing influence.
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