Charles Dickens

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Dickens works

Major Works

Sketches by Boz (1836)
Pickwick Papers (serialized monthly 1836-37)
Oliver Twist (serialized monthly 1837-39)
Nicholas Nickleby (serialized monthly 1838-39)
The Old Curiosity Shop (serialized weekly 1840-41)
Barnaby Rudge (serialized weekly 1841)
Martin Chuzzlewit (serialized monthly 1843-44)
Dombey and Son (serialized monthly 1846-48)
David Copperfield (serialized monthly 1849-50)
Bleak House (serialized monthly 1852-53)
Hard Times (serialized weekly 1854)
Little Dorrit (serialized monthly 1855-57)
A Tale of Two Cities (serialized weekly 1859)
Great Expectations (serialized weekly 1860-61)
Our Mutual Friend (serialized monthly 1864-65)
The Mystery of Edwin Drood - unfinished (serialized monthly 1870)
Minor Works

American Notes (1843)
Pictures from Italy (1846)
The Life of Our Lord (1846)
A Child's History of England (serialized weekly 1851-53)
Reprinted Pieces (1858)
The Uncommercial Traveller (1861)
Christmas Books

A Christmas Carol (1843)
The Chimes (1844)
The Cricket on the Hearth (1845)
The Battle of Life (1846)
The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848)
Weekly Magazines

Master Humphrey's Clock (1840-41)
Household Words (1850-59)
All the Year Round (1859-70)

The Chimes

One New Year's Eve Trotty, a "ticket-porter" or casual messenger, is filled with gloom at the reports of crime and immorality in the newspapers, and wonders whether the working classes are simply wicked by nature. His daughter Meg and her long-time fiancé Richard arrive and announce their decision to marry next day. Trotty hides his misgivings, but their happiness is dispelled by an encounter with a pompous alderman, Cute, plus a political economist and a young gentleman with a nostalgia for the past, all of whom make Trotty, Meg and Richard feel they hardly have a right to exist, let alone marry.
Trotty carries a note for Cute to Sir Joseph Bowley MP, who dispenses charity to the poor in the manner of a paternal dictator. Bowley is ostentatiously settling his debts to ensure a clean start to the new year, and berates Trotty because he owes a few shillings to his local shop which he cannot pay off. Returning home, convinced that he and his fellow poor are naturally ungrateful and have no place in society, Trotty encounters Will Fern, a poor countryman, and his orphaned niece, Lilian. Fern has been unfairly accused of vagrancy and wants to visit Cute to set matters straight, but from a conversation overheard at Bowley's house, Trotty is able to warn him that Cute plans to have him arrested and imprisoned. He takes the pair home with him and he and Meg share their meagre food and poor lodging with the visitors. Meg tries to hide her distress, but it seems she has been dissuaded from marrying Richard by her encounter with Cute and the others.
In the night the bells seem to call Trotty. Going to the church he finds the tower door unlocked and climbs to the bellchamber, where he discovers the spirits of the bells and their goblin attendants who reprimand him for losing faith in man's destiny to improve and progress. He is told that he fell from the tower during his climb and is now dead, and Meg's subsequent life must now be an object lesson for him. There follows a series of visions which he is forced to watch, helpless to interfere with the troubled lives of Meg, Richard, Will and Lilian over the subsequent years. Richard descends into alcoholism; Meg eventually marries him in an effort to save him but he dies ruined, leaving her with a baby. Will is driven in and out of prison by petty laws and restrictions; Lilian turns to prostitution. In the end, destitute, Meg is driven to contemplate drowning herself and her child, thus committing the mortal sins of murder and suicide. The Chimes' intention is to teach Trotty that, far from being naturally wicked, mankind is formed to strive for nobler things, and will fall only when crushed and repressed beyond bearing. Trotty breaks down when he sees Meg poised to jump into the river, cries that he has learned his lesson, and begs the Chimes to save her, whereupon he finds himself able to touch her and prevent her from jumping.
With this the vision ends and Trotty finds himself awakening at home as if from a dream as the bells ring in the New Year, and the book ends with celebrations for Meg and Richard's wedding day.

The Mistery of Edwin Drood

The Mystery of Edwin Drood is the final novel by Charles Dickens.The novel was left unfinished at the time of Dickens' death, and thus how it might have ended remains unknown. The novel is named after Edwin Drood, but it mostly tells the story of his uncle, a choirmaster named John Jasper, who is in love with his pupil, Rosa Bud. Miss Bud is Drood's fiancée and has also caught the eye of the high-spirited and hot-tempered Neville Landless, who comes from Ceylon with his twin sister, Helena. Neville Landless and Drood take a dislike to one another the moment they meet. Drood later disappears under mysterious circumstances. Dickens died before he could finish the mystery.

The story is set in Cloisterham, a lightly fictionalised Rochester, and feelingly evokes the atmosphere of the town as much as its streets and buildings.

The battle of life

The Battle of Life: A Love Story is a novella by Charles Dickens, first published in 1846. It is the fourth of his five "Christmas Books", coming after The Cricket on the Hearth and followed by The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain.

The setting is an English village that stands on the site of a historic battle. Some characters refer to the battle as a metaphor for the struggles of life, hence the title.

"Battle" is noteworthy in that it is the only one of the five Christmas Books that has no supernatural or explicitly religious elements. (One scene takes place at Christmastime, but it is not the final scene.) The story bears some resemblance to The Cricket on the Hearth in two aspects: It has a non-urban setting and it is resolved with a romantic twist. It is even less of a social novel than is "Cricket." As is typical with Dickens, the ending is a happy one.

It is one of Dickens' lesser-known Christmas works and has never attained any high level of popularity, a trait it shares with The Haunted Man.

The old curiosity shop.

The Old Curiosity Shop tells the story of Nell Trent, a beautiful and virtuous young girl of 'not quite fourteen.' An orphan, she lives with her maternal grandfather (whose name is never revealed) in his shop of odds and ends. Her grandfather loves her dearly, and Nell does not complain, but she lives a lonely existence with almost no friends her own age. Her only friend is Kit, an honest boy employed at the shop, and whom she is teaching to write. Secretly obsessed with ensuring that Nell does not die in poverty as her parents did, her grandfather attempts to make Nell a good inheritance through gambling at cards. He keeps his nocturnal games a secret, but borrows heavily from the evil Daniel Quilp, a malicious, grotesquely deformed, hunchbacked dwarf moneylender. In the end, he gambles away what little money they have, and Quilp seizes the opportunity to take possession of the shop and evict Nell and her grandfather. Her grandfather suffers a breakdown that leaves him bereft of his wits, and Nell takes him away to the Midlands of England, to live as beggars.

If you want to know more about this book read it.

David Copperfield of Charles Dickens

Dickens' eighth novel, illustrated by Phiz, is a thinly disguised autobiography with many of the story lines mirroring Dickens' own life. Dickens' friend and first biographer, John Forster, wrote that "Dickens never stood so high in reputation as at the completion of Copperfield", and that in the novel Dickens had cast the suspicion "that underneath the fiction lay something of the author's life."

In telling the story of the child David, Dickens displays the unique ability to make the reader see through the eyes of the child, capturing the very essence of childhood.

Sketches by Boz

Sketches by "Boz," Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People (commonly known as Sketches by Boz) is a collection of short pieces published by Charles Dickens in 1836 accompanied by illustrations by George Cruikshank. The 56 sketches concern London scenes and people and are divided into four sections: "Our Parish", "Scenes", "Characters", and "Tales". The material in the first three of these sections is non-fiction. The last section comprises fictional stories.

CHARLES DICKENS

Charles John Huffam Dickens (Portsmouth, England, February 7, 1812 - Gads Hill Place, England, June 9, 1870) was a famous English novelist, one of the best known in the literature, and the principal of the Victorian era . Knew how to handle gender master narrative with humor and irony, and an acute social critic algid. In his work are the descriptions of people and places, both real and imagined. Sometimes used the pseudonym Boz.

He spent his childhood in London and in Kent, described more frequently in his works. He left school and was forced to work at a boy, his father being imprisoned for debt. Most of his training as a self-made, and his novel "David Copperfield" (1850) is partly autobiographical and their feelings about a faithful representation. From 1827 began to prepare for work as a reporter, in a publication of an uncle, The Mirror of Parliament, and for the liberal daily The Morning Chronicle.

In 1833 he published The Monthly Magazine, a series of articles descriptive of everyday life under the pseudonym Boz. Published in 1836, following this style, "Sketches by Boz." This work was followed by "The Pickwick Papers" (1836-1837), a work in a similar style to the comics, who noted an editorial.

He edited the weekly Household News (1850-1859) and All the Year Round (1859-1870), wrote two travel books, American Notes (1842), Images of Italy (1846), Bleak House (1852-1853), Little Dorritt (1855-1857) and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which was left unfinished, and others.

His family life was turbulent, with several failed marriages and many children.

He died on June 9, 1870 and his remains were buried in Westminster Abbe.

Charles Dickens 'Great Expectetions'

One of Dickens’ shorter novels and also one of his most influential is Great Expectations. It appeared initially in serial form in All The Year Round between 1860 and 1861 and is now considered to be one of his finest novels. It concerns the young boy Philip Pirrip (known as ‘Pip’) and his development through life after an early meeting with the escaped convict Abel Magwitch, who he treats kindly despite his fear. His unpleasant sister and her humorous and friendly blacksmith husband, Joe, bring him up. Crucial to his development as an individual is his introduction to Miss Havisham (one of Dickens’ most brilliant portraits), a now aging woman who has given up on life after being jilted at the altar. Cruelly, Havisham has brought up her daughter Estella to revenge her own pain and so as Pip falls in love with her she is made to torture him in romance. Aspiring to be a gentleman despite his humble beginnings, Pip seems to achieve the impossible by receiving a fund of wealth from an unknown source and being sent to London with the lawyer Jaggers. He is employed but eventually loses everything and Estella marries another. His benefactor turns out to have been Magwitch and his future existence is based upon outgrowing the great expectations and returning to Joe and honest laout. Eventually he is reunited with Estella. There have been a number of film adaptations of the novel, the most recent of which featured Anne Bancroft as Miss Havisham. Doubtless, this was something of an in-joke meant for those who know Bancroft best as Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate which is very much inspired by this Dickens novel and benefits from the comparison.

Our mutual friend

Our Mutual Friend (written in the years 1864–65) is the last novel completed by Charles Dickens and is one of his most sophisticated works.

The plot is: John Harmon, son of a wealthy dust contractor and heir to his father's fortune if he agrees to marry Bella Wilfer, is away from England when his father dies. On the way home he is supposed drowned in a case of mistaken identity. With his supposed death the dust fortune goes to Boffin, his father's former servant. John gets himself hired into the Boffin home as secretary John Rokesmith. Here he meets Bella and, with the help of the kindly Boffins, wins her love as Rokesmith, and marries her. He later reveals his true identity and regains his fortune.

The principal characters in Our mutual friend are: John Harmon, Bella Wilfer, Nicodemus (Noddy) Boffin, Mrs. Henrietta Boffin, Lizzie Hexam, Charley Hexam, Mortimer Lightwood, Eugene Wrayburn, Jenny Wren, Mr Riah, Bradley Headstone, Silas Wegg, Mr Venus, Mr. John Podsnap, Mrs Podsnap, Georgiana Podsnap, Mr Inspector, Mr Fledgeby and Roger "Rogue" Riderhood.

The Pickwick Papers of Charles Dickens

The Pickwick Papers was Dickens’ first novel and was serialised under the title The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club between April 1836 and November 1837 when its author was only in his mid-twenties. Unlike some of his later works it is extremely episodic and comic. It always shows its origins in a periodical with its cliff-hangers and the way Dickens changes the story and various characters’ position in the novel as it grows and according to their popularity (such the Wellers). Mr Samuel Pickwick is the founder and chairman of the absurd Pickwick Club which consists Tupman, Snodgrass and Winkle who go through various highly amusing and often quite ridiculous adventures that are scantily interconnected and never amount to a complex sequence of events until perhaps Pickwick’s disastrous misunderstanding with Mrs Bardell. The story instead progresses near-randomly through trips to Rochester (and the meeting with the awful Jingle who challenges Winkle to a duel), Dingley Dell, Eatanswill and Bury St Edmunds. In these stages of the novel the only elements holding the plot together are the troublesome rascal Jingle and his servant Trotter who recur often. Later, Pickwick ends up rather unfortunately in the Fleet Prison and various romances ensue for the main characters to general amusement for the reader if never a sense of great import or substance. Although the book begins Dickens’ lengthy concern about prisons and the evil of lawyers, it is less dark and full of mystery than later works.

Christmas Carol

The story is about Ebenezer Scrooge. At the beginning of the book he is a mean old man who runs a business lending people money. These people are poor and often cannot pay him back. He pays his clerk Bob Cratchit badly.

On Christmas Eve, Scrooge refuses an invitation to his nephew's house for Christmas dinner, telling him he hates it (he calls it a "Humbug"). He then refuses to give money to two men who are collecting for charity.

Later that evening, he is visited by the ghost of his dead business partner Jacob Marley, who went to Hell because of his bad life. He tells Scrooge that the same future will happen to him unless he changes and that during the night he will be visited by three more ghosts. These will show him where he went wrong in his life, and how to be a better person in the future..

If you want to know more about this book, read it!

Charles Dickens - Hard Times

Is perhaps the archetypal Dickens novel, full as it is with family difficulties, estrangement, rotten values and unhappiness. It was published in 1854 and it is the story of the family of Thomas Gradgrind (perhaps the archetypal Dickens name) and occurs in the imaginary Coketown, an industrial city inspired by Preston.

Gradgrind is a man obsessed with misguided ‘Utilitarian’ values that make him trust facts, statistics and practicality more than emotion and is based upon James Mill (the Utilitarian leader). He directs his own children, Louisa and Tom, in this same way: enforcing an artless existence upon them. For instance, he makes Louisa marry Josiah Bounderby who is three decades her elder. Her only love is really for her brother who is in Bounderby’s employ.

The cynical James Harthouse arrives and attempts to seduce her but she is inspired by the experience to escape her constricted life and her imagination takes over. Her father becomes aware of the nonsense of his own schemes and he protects his daughter from her husband. Not everything is cleared up, though, and Tom steals from the bank and dishonestly tries to shift the blame. He does so successfully for a time but eventually gets found out and must leave the country.

Contemporary critics such as Macaulay savaged the book for its supposed ‘sullen socialism’ but has become well thought-of in since the favour of George Bernard Shaw (this is true also of Bleak House and Little Dorrit).

Charles Dickens 'Great Expectetions'

Dombey and son

The full title of the novel is Dealings with the firm of Dombey and Son and it was published like the majority of Dickens’ work in instalments, between 1847 and 1848. Mr Dombey is a proud, unkind and rich merchant in London. His only concern is the continuation of the family name in the context of his firm. For this reason, Dombey cruelly neglects his devoted daughter Florence for the young Paul who he values solely for his potential as a successor in the firm and not as a human being. Further he sends her lover from his firm off on business to the West Indies to prevent their marriage since he is merely a clerk. We watch as Dombey’s pride allows him to fall prey to flatterers: the villainous manager Carker and Major Joe Bagstock particularly. The former destroys his marriage to Edith Granger and as the plot pans out Dombey is left without his fortune, son or wife and lives in solitude and misery. He must accept the kindness of his daughter and Walter Gay, the clerk, with humility to end the book happily. The novel is notable for it depiction of railways (Carker is killed by one, indeed) just as they became prevalent in English transport and changed life forever.

David Copperfield.

David Copperfield is a english boy who tells his life. The story begins the day of his birth, the first of the volume´s story , finaly when David view that Micawer tricks Traddles sign papers making him undertake to pay debts of Micawer. This story is very realistic, because has a lot descripcions of feelings, characters… We can also see the moral and psychological development suffering that goes to David throughout his life. He is a child who, until he gets his purposes, he has very bad luck with the persons who take care of him and the events that happens.

The Chimes

One New Year's Eve Trotty, a "ticket-porter" or casual messenger, is filled with gloom at the reports of crime and immorality in the newspapers, and wonders whether the working classes are simply wicked by nature. His daughter Meg and her long-time fiancé Richard arrive and announce their decision to marry next day. Trotty hides his misgivings, but their happiness is dispelled by an encounter with a pompous alderman, Cute, plus a political economist and a young gentleman with a nostalgia for the past, all of whom make Trotty, Meg and Richard feel they hardly have a right to exist, let alone marry.
Trotty carries a note for Cute to Sir Joseph Bowley MP, who dispenses charity to the poor in the manner of a paternal dictator. Bowley is ostentatiously settling his debts to ensure a clean start to the new year, and berates Trotty because he owes a few shillings to his local shop which he cannot pay off. Returning home, convinced that he and his fellow poor are naturally ungrateful and have no place in society, Trotty encounters Will Fern, a poor countryman, and his orphaned niece, Lilian. Fern has been unfairly accused of vagrancy and wants to visit Cute to set matters straight, but from a conversation overheard at Bowley's house, Trotty is able to warn him that Cute plans to have him arrested and imprisoned. He takes the pair home with him and he and Meg share their meagre food and poor lodging with the visitors. Meg tries to hide her distress, but it seems she has been dissuaded from marrying Richard by her encounter with Cute and the others.
In the night the bells seem to call Trotty. Going to the church he finds the tower door unlocked and climbs to the bellchamber, where he discovers the spirits of the bells and their goblin attendants who reprimand him for losing faith in man's destiny to improve and progress. He is told that he fell from the tower during his climb and is now dead, and Meg's subsequent life must now be an object lesson for him. There follows a series of visions which he is forced to watch, helpless to interfere with the troubled lives of Meg, Richard, Will and Lilian over the subsequent years. Richard descends into alcoholism; Meg eventually marries him in an effort to save him but he dies ruined, leaving her with a baby. Will is driven in and out of prison by petty laws and restrictions; Lilian turns to prostitution. In the end, destitute, Meg is driven to contemplate drowning herself and her child, thus committing the mortal sins of murder and suicide. The Chimes' intention is to teach Trotty that, far from being naturally wicked, mankind is formed to strive for nobler things, and will fall only when crushed and repressed beyond bearing. Trotty breaks down when he sees Meg poised to jump into the river, cries that he has learned his lesson, and begs the Chimes to save her, whereupon he finds himself able to touch her and prevent her from jumping.
With this the vision ends and Trotty finds himself awakening at home as if from a dream as the bells ring in the New Year, and the book ends with celebrations for Meg and Richard's wedding day.

Domby and son

The story concerns Paul Dombey, the wealthy owner of the shipping company of the book's title, whose dream is to have a son to continue his business. The book begins when his son is born, and Dombey's wife dies shortly after giving birth. Following the advice of Mrs Louisa Chick, his sister, Dombey employs a wet nurse named Mrs Richards (Toodle). Dombey already has a daughter, Florence, whom he neglects. One day, Mrs Richards, Florence and her maid, Susan Nipper, secretly pay a visit Mrs Richard's house in Stagg's Gardens in order that she can see her children. During this trip, Florence becomes separated and is kidnapped for a short time by Good Mrs Brown before being returned to the streets. She makes her way to Dombey and Son's offices in the City and is guided there by Walter Gay, an employee, who first introduces her to his uncle, the navigation instrument maker Solomon Gill, at his shop the Midshipman.

Oliver Twist

The story of little Oliver, raised in an orphanage, used and abused in a funeral home, which the escape route to London is recruited by a gang of thieves that he does not recognize as such, is not only a superb showcase of very famous Dickensian creations (Fagin , the leader of the gang of juvenile delinquents, the thief Jack Dawkins, the murderer Sikes, the prostitute Nancy, the mysterious Monks, Oliver's relentless pursuer), but a magnificent and thrilling tale of innocence beleaguered.