Charles Dickens

At 58 years old, Charles Dickens has this physical status:

Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic.

He wrote some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is widely regarded by some as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period.

His works soared during his lifetime, and by the twentieth century, critics and scholars had identified him as a literary genius.

His books and short stories are still popular today. As his father was imprisoned in a debtor's jail, Born in Portsmouth, Dickens left school to work in a factory.

Despite his formal education, he edited a weekly journal for 20 years, authored 15 books, five novellas, hundreds of short stories, and non-fiction articles, lectured extensively and advocated for children's rights, education, and other social reforms. Dickens' literary success began in 1836 with the serial publication of The Pickwick Papers.

He had become a worldwide literary celebrity, known for his humour, satire, and keen observation of character and culture within a few years.

Early life

Charles Dickens was born on 7 February 1812 at 1 Mile End Terrace (now 393 Commercial Road), Landport, Hampshire, England, second of eight children of Elizabeth Dickens (1789–1863) and John Dickens (1785–1851). His father was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office and was temporarily stationed in the district. He ordered Christopher Huffam, rigger to His Majesty's Navy, gentleman and director of a long-established business, to serve as his godfather to Charles. Paul Dombey, the owner of a shipping business in Dickens' novel Dombey and Son (1848), is thought to be inspired by Huffam.

John Dickens was called back to London in January 1815 and the family relocated to Norfolk Street, Fitzrovia. When Charles was four years old, they moved to Sheerness and thence to Chatham, Kent, where he spent his formative years until he was 11. His early life seems to have been idyllic, although he regarded himself as a "very little and not-particularly-taken-care-of boy" in his situation.

Charles spent time outside, but he also read avidly, including Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding's picaresque books, as well as Robinson Crusoe and Gil Blas. He read and reread The Arabian Nights and Elizabeth Inchbald's Collected Farces. Joseph Grimaldi, the father of modern clowning, performed at the Star Theatre in Rochester at age 7. He imitated Grimaldi's clowning on several occasions and would also edit Joseph Grimaldi's Memoirs. He retained vivid memories of childhood, aided by his acquaintness and events that he used in his writing. His father's brief stint as a clerk in the Navy Pay Office gave him a few years of private education, first at a dame school and then in Chatham's, William Giles, a dissenter.

This time came to an end in June 1822, when John Dickens was returned to Navy Pay Office in Somerset House, and the family (except for Charles, who stayed behind to complete his final term at school) moved to Camden Town in London. John Dickens was compelled into the Marshalse debtors' prison in Southwark, London, in 1824, despite rapidly rising debts and living beyond his means. As was normal at the time, his wife and youngest children joined him. At 112 College Place, Camden Town, Charles, then 12 years old, boarded with Elizabeth Roylance, a family friend. Mrs Roylance was described as "a reduced impoverished old lady, long known to our families," whom Dickens later immortalized "with a few changes and enhancements" in Dombey and Son. Archibald Russell, a fat, good-natured, kind old man" with a quiet old lady and lame son in Lant Street, Southwark, lived in a back-attic in the house of an Insolvent Court. In The Old Curiosity Shop, they inspired the Garlands.

He spent the day at the Marshalsea on Sundays with his sister Frances, who was escaping from her studies at the Royal Academy of Music. In Little Dorrit, Dickens used the jail later as a setting. Dickens was forced to leave school and work ten-hour days at Warren's Blacking Warehouse, on Hungerford Stairs, near the new Charing Cross railway station, where he earned six shillings a week before. Dickens and later inspired his fiction and essays, becoming the foundation of his argument for change in socioeconomic and labor conditions, the rigours of which he believed were unfairly carried by the poor. He wondered "how I could have been so easily cast away at such a young age," he later wrote. John Forster (from Life of Charles Dickens) recalled him.

The boys were working in a room in which the window opened onto the street as the warehouse was relocated to Chandos Street in Covent Garden's trendy, bustling district. Small audiences assembled and watched them at work, and Dickens' biographer Simon Callow's estimation that the public display was "a new refinement to his misery."

Elizabeth Dickens, John Dickens' mother, died and left him £450, just a few months after his detention. Dickens was released from jail in the hopes of preserving this tradition. Dickens arranged for the repayment of his debts and the Marshalsea's home, according to Mrs Roylance, who was arrested under Insolvent Debtors Act.

Elizabeth Dickens, Charles' mother, did not immediately support his removal from the boot-blacking warehouse. Dickens' views that a father should rule the family and a mother finds their proper place inside: "I never forgot, I never will forget, and I never will forget," says the mother. His mother's inability to request his return was a factor in his father's unsatisfied attitude toward women.

"I had no advice, no advice, no encouragement, no consolation, no help, no encouragement, no help, no assistance, no encouragement, no sympathy, no obligation, no encouragement, no encouragement, no encouragement, no encouragement, no encouragement, no encouragement, no suggestion, no assistance, no matter what I was looking for in his latest, and most autobiographical, book, David Copperfield said: "I had no advice, no advice, no encouragement, no encouragement, no encouragement, no encouragement, no one of his youth, not to whom I could...I can call to heaven, no one, no sympathy, no one, no one, no one, no one, no one, no one of any assistance, no one, no one of any, no one, no one, no one, no one of any assistance, no one of any one of any, no one of any, no one of any, no one of any, no one in his... I could bring him to hell, no one, no one of any, no one of any advice, no one of any kind of any one of any, no one of his works in his son'sadad's no one of his son's or encouragement, no one, no one of his mother, no one of his mother, no one of his son'sada aide, no one of his son, no one of his father, no one of his mother, no one of his son'spiration, his father, no one of his mother, no one of his own, no one of his father, no one of his own, no one of his own, no one of his son's, no one of his own, no one of his father, no one of his son's, no one of his mother, no one of his mother, no one of his own, no one of his mother, nor in his mother, no one of his mother, no one of any advice, no one of any advice, no one of his he's, "I have but in his father, no one of his mother, but in his mother, no one of his father, or father, no one of his mother or child, no one, no one of his mother or father, but in his own, nor child, nor aide, nor in he's, no one he's, nor woman, nor woman, nor support, no one, no one."

Dickens was eventually sent to the Wellington House Academy in Camden Town, where he remained until March 1827, having spent about two years there. In Mr Creakle's Establishment in David Copperfield, he did not consider it to be a good school: "Much of the haphazard, desultory education, and poor discipline were all exemplified by the headmaster's sadistic brutality, the seedy ushers, and general run-down atmosphere are embodied."

Dickens served as a junior clerk in Ellis and Blackmore, lawyers, of Holborn Court, Gray's Inn, from May 1827 to November 1828. He was a gifted impersonator and impersonated those around him: customers, attorneys, and clerks. He went to the theater on a daily basis: he said he went to the theatre for at least three years. Charles Mathews and Dickens learnedt his "monopolylogues" (farces in which Mathews played every part) by heart. Having figured out Gurney's method of shorthand in his spare time, he vowed to become a freelance journalist. Thomas Charlton, a distant relative, of Doctors' Commons and Dickens, was able to cover the legal proceedings for almost four years. This study was intended to inform works such as Nicholas Nickleby, Dombey and Son, and especially Bleak House, whose colorful portrayal of the machinations and bureaucracy of Dickens' ideas of the poor, which was ostensibly to the public, and was a platform for propagation of Dickens' views, especially the heavy burden on the poor who were compelled by circumstances to "go to law."

Dickens met Maria Beadnell, his first love in 1830, who is believed to have been the model for David Copperfield's character Dora. Maria's parents opposed the courtship and broke the marriage by sending her to school in Paris.

Later life

Dickens was involved in the Staplehurst rail accident in Kent on September 9, 1865, while returning from Paris with Ellen Ternan. The first seven carriages of the train plunged off a cast iron bridge that was under repair. The only first-class carriage to stay on the route was the one in which Dickens was traveling. Dickens tended and comforted the wounded and the dying with a flask of brandy and a hat that had been refreshed with water before rescuers arrived. He remembered the unfinished manuscript for Our Mutual Friend before leaving, and he rode back to his carriage to retrieve it.

Dickens later used the experience of the accident as inspiration for his short ghost story "The Signal-Man," in which the central character has a premonition of his own death in a rail accident. The Clayton Tunnel rail accident in Sussex in 1861 was also based on several previous rail accidents, such as the Clayton Tunnel rail accident in 1861. Dickens managed to avoid appearing at the inquest to avoid revealing that he was traveling with Ternan and her mother, which might have sparked controversies. Dickens was afraid travelling by train and would consider alternate routes if available. "I have sudden tremblings of terror even when riding in a hansom taxi, which are entirely unreasonable but very insurmountable," he wrote in 1868. "I've often seen him in a railway carriage when there was a small jolt," Dickens' son said. He was already in a state of panic and gripped the seat with both hands when it happened.

Though he was planning a second trip to the United States, the Civil War in America in 1861 delayed his plans. Dickens' second American reading tour began in 1867, more than two years since the war. He devoted the remainder of the month to a round of dinners with such celebrities as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and American publisher James T. Fields. The readings started in early December. He wrote 76 readings, netting £19,000 from December 1867 to April 1868. Dickens hopped between Boston and New York, where he gave 22 readings at Steinway Hall. Despite starting to suffer from what he described as "true American catarrh," he maintained a schedule that would have thrown a much younger man, even securing enough sleighing in Central Park to fit in some sleighing.

During his travels, he saw a change in the lives and the conditions of America. On April 18, he made his last appearance at Delmonico's, where he promised never to denounce America again. Dickens could barely sustain good food by the end of the tour, subsisting on champagne and eggs beat in sherry. He boarded the Cunard liner Russia back to Britain on April 23, barely escaping a federal tax lien against the proceeds of his lecture tour.

Dickens performed a series of "farewell readings" in England, Scotland, and Ireland from October 6 to 9. He managed to produce 75 in the provinces from a contracted 100 readings, with a further 12 in London. He was affected by giddiness and fits of paralysis as he moved forward. On 18 April 1869 in Chester, he had a stroke. He died in Preston, Lancashire, on April 22nd, 1869, on the doctor's recommendation; the tour was cancelled due to the doctor's instructions. After further provincial readings were postponed, Edwin Drood's last book, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was released. It was fashionable in the 1860s to 'do the slums,' and Dickens toured opium dens in Shadwell, where he encountered an elderly addict named "Laskar Sal," who was the model for Edwin Drood's "Opium Sal" in Edwin Drood.

After Dickens recovered enough energy, he arranged, with medical permission, for a final series of readings to partially compensate his sponsors for the money they had lost due to his illness. On 11 January to 15 March 1870, there were 12 performances, the last at 8:00 p.m. at St. James' Hall, London, the last at 8 p.m. Despite being in poor health by then, he read A Christmas Carol and Pickwick's Trial. On May 2, he made his last public appearance at a Royal Academy banquet in the presence of the Prince and Princess of Wales, paying special attention to his friend, illustrator Daniel Maclise's death.

Dickens suffered another stroke at his house on June 8th after a full day of work on Edwin Drood. He never recovered consciousness, and at Gads Hill Place the next day, he died. Dickens may have died in Peckham as a result of the stroke, and his mistress Ellen Ternan and her maids had him taken back to Gads Hill so that the public would not know the truth about their friendship. He was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner, contrary to his desire to be buried "in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner." According to a printed epitaph that was not available at the time of the funeral: The funeral was printed epitaph.

Dickens' letter to the Clerk of the Privy Council in March indicates he was given and had accepted a baronetcy, which was not gazetted before his death. In reaction to his sister-in-law Georgina's request that he sit, his last words were "on the ground." Dean Arthur Penrhyn Stanley's memorial elegy on Sunday, 19 June 1870, five days after Dickens was buried in the Abbey, lauding "the innovative and loving humorist who we now mourn" for leading by his own example. Stanley assured those present that "the spot would become a sacred one for both the New World and the Old" as the representative of literature, not of this island alone, but also of those who speak our English tongue.

Dickens left the estate to his long-time buddy Georgina Hogarth, who also received a tax-free sum of £8,000 (equivalent to £814,000 in 2021). Despite the fact that Dickens and his wife were divorced for several years at the time of his death, he paid her a £600 (£61,100) yearly income and made her similar allowances in his will. He also left £19 19s (£2,000 in 2021) to each servant in his service at the time of his death.

Source

Career

Dickens was upbeat and more self-confident in 1832, when he reached his 20th birthday. He loved imitating and popular entertainment, but he didn't have a clear, concrete picture of what he wanted to be like, and yet feared fame. He was a child of the Garrick Club and was given an acting audition at Covent Garden, where the boss George Bartley and actor Charles Kemble were invited to see him. Dickens was keen to imitate comedian Charles Mathews, but he was unable to attend due to a cold. He had started preparing for his writing career before another chance arose.

Dickens wrote his first story, "A Dinner at Poplar Walk," in 1833, according to the London periodical Monthly Journal. For the first time in 1832, William Barrow, Dickens' uncle on his mother's side, got a job on The Mirror of Parliament, and he served in Parliament for the first time. He rented rooms at Furnival's Inn and served as a political journalist, covering Parliamentary debates, and he travelled around Britain to cover election campaigns for the Morning Chronicle. Boz's journalism, as in the form of drawings in periodicals, produced his first collection of works in 1836: Sketches by Boz – Boz's Family name he used as a pseudonym for some years. After a character in Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield, Dickens seems to have adopted it from the word 'Moses', which he had given to his youngest brother Augustus Dickens. "Moses" became "Boses" when they were pronounced "Boses" by someone with a head cold, a nodal term that was later reduced to Boz. Dickens' own name was described as "queer" by a contemporary critic who wrote in 1849: "Mr Dickens, as if in retaliation for his own queer name, does bestowe younger queer ones on his fictitious creations." Dickens also edited and edited journals throughout his literary career. The Morning Chronicle launched an evening edition in January 1835, under the editorship of the Chronicle's music critic, George Hogarth. Hogarth invited him to contribute Street Sketches and Dickens became a regular visitor to his Fulham home, delighting in the company of Hogarth's three children, Georgina, Mary and 19-year-old Catherine.

Dickens made rapid strides both professionally and socially. He began a friendship with William Harrison Ainsworth, the author of the highwayman book Rookwood (1834), whose bachelor salon in Harrow Road had become the meeting place for a group that included Daniel Maclise, Benjamin Disraeli, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and George Cruikshank. All these people became his acquaintances and collaborators, with the exception of Disraeli, and he met his first publisher, John Macrone at the house. Boz's popularity prompted a call from publishers Chapman and Hall for Dickens to provide text to complement Robert Seymour's engraved illustrations in a monthly letterpress. Seymour committed suicide after the second instalment. Dickens, who wanted to write a string of sketches, hired "Phiz" to handle the engravings (which were reduced from four to two per instalment). The resulting story, The Pickwick Papers, became The Pickwick Papers, and although the first few episodes were not successful, Sam Weller's appearance in the fourth episode (the first to be illustrated by Phiz) marked a dramatic rise in its success. The last instalment sold 40,000 copies. "The Sam Weller Bump is without question the most significant increase in English literature, according to The Paris Review, "arguably the most significant rise in English language publishing is the Sam Weller Bump." The Pickwick Papers, a publishing phenomenon, was published in John Sutherland's book "[t]he most significant single novel of the Victorian period." Following the unprecedented success, Pickwick cigars, playing cards, china figurines, Sam Weller puzzles, Weller boot polish, and joke books were created.

Nicholas Dames of The Atlantic writes, "Literature" is not a large enough term for Pickwick to describe in modern mass culture. It referred to itself, as well as a new one that we've come to refer to as "entertainment." Dickens accepted the editorship of Bentley's Miscellany in November 1836, a position he held for three years before he lost touch with the owner. While writing four plays and also writing four, he wrote the first instalments of The Pickwick Papers in 1836. Oliver Twist, who appeared in 1838, became one of Dickens' most popular tales, and was the first Victorian novel with a child protagonist.

Dickens married Catherine Thomson Hogarth (1815–1879), the daughter of Evening Chronicle editor George Hogarth, on April 2, 1836, after a one-year engagement and between episodes two and three of The Pickwick Papers. They were married in St Luke's Church, Chelsea, London. The couple returned to Furnival's Inn for a short honeymoon in Chalk, Kent. Charles, the first of their ten children, was born in January 1837 and a few months later, the family purchased a house in Bloomsbury at 48 Doughty Street, London (on which Charles had a three-year lease from 1837 to 1839). Frederick and Catherine Hogarth, Dickens' younger brother, were taken into the house. Dickens became attached to Mary, and he died in his arms after a brief illness in 1837. Dickens died as a result of his shock, and he and Catherine remained at a little farm on Hampstead Heath for a fortnight, which was odd for him. Dickens envisioned Mary; the woman he created after her, Rose Maylie, was able to die in his fantasy after she was born; and, according to Ackroyd, he rely on memories of her for his later descriptions of Little Nell and Florence Dombey. His sadness was so bad that he was unable to make the deadline for the Pickwick Papers in June and had to cancel the Oliver Twist instalment the next month. Forster's becoming unofficial business manager and the first to read his work, the time in Hampstead was a time when a growing friendship between Dickens and John Forster could have existed; Dickens and John Forster soon became his unofficial business manager and the first to read his books.

His popularity as a novelist plowed. The teenage queen of Victoria devoured both Oliver Twist and The Pickwick Papers, staying up until midnight to discuss them. Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41) and, later, his first historical book, Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty, were published in monthly instalments before being converted into books.

During all his activity during this period, John Macrone was bought off, and Richard Bentley took over all his rights in Oliver Twist. Other signs of dissatisfaction with this age also emerged: he flirted with Eleanor Picken, his solicitor's nascent niece, and one night grabbed her and carried her down to the sea. Both he and the others were supposed to drown in the "sad sea waves" that were forecast. She finally became free, but she remained a distance after that. He precipitously began a two-month tour of Scotland in June 1841 and then told Forster that he had opted to go to America in September 1841. Master Humphrey's Clock was decommissioned, but Dickens was still keen on the prospect of the weekly newspaper, a form he adored, an admiration that had arisened from his childhood readings of Tatler and The Spectator.

Dickens was surprised by the Tories' return to office, who referred to them as "people whom, ideologically, I despise and abhor." He had been encouraged to support the Liberals in Reading but decided against it due to financial constraints. He wrote three anti-Tory verse satires ("The Fine Old English Gentleman," "The Quack Doctor's Proclamation," and "Subjects for Painters"), which were all released in The Examiner.

Dickens and his wife arrived in Boston, Massachusetts, aboard the RMS Britannia on their first trip to the United States and Canada on January 22nd. Georgina Hogarth, Catherine's niece, joined the Dickens family in Marylebone and spent the children with the young family who had been left behind. She remained with them as a housekeeper, organizer, consultant, and friend until Dickens' death in 1870. After Georgina and Mary, Dickens portrayed Agnes Wickfield's character.

In a travelogue, he described his experiences in American Notes for General Circulation. Dickens' Notes includes a strong condemnation of slavery, which he had condemned as early as The Pickwick Papers, citing newspaper accounts of slaves rescued by their masters who were disfigured by their masters. Despite the abolitionist sentiments gleaned from his trip to America, some modern commentators have pointed out inconsistencies in Dickens' racial inequalities. For example, he has been chastised for his post-acquitescence in Governor Eyre's brutal crackdown in the 1860s Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica and his inability to join other British progressives in condemning it. Dickens returned to Washington, D.C., and began a westward journey, with brief stops in Cincinnati and Louisville, to St Louis, Missouri. While there, he expressed a desire to see an American prairie before returning east. A group of 13 men and Dickens accompanied Looking Glass Prairie, a trip 30 miles into Illinois, before heading out with Dickens to visit Looking Glass Prairie.

Dickens spent a month in New York City, lecturing the importance of international copyright legislation and pirating his American work. He persuaded a group of 25 writers, led by Washington Irving, to sign a petition to represent him in Congress, but the media was generally dismissive of his claim, saying that he should be grateful for his fame and that it was mercenary to complain about his work being stolen.

According to critic Kate Flint, who says he "discovered himself a cultural commodity, and its circulation had passed out his hands," prompting him to become interested in and delve into topics of public and personal personas in the forthcoming books. She writes that he assumed the position of "influential commentator" both on the record and in his fiction, as shown in his next few books. Niagara Falls, Toronto, Kingston, and Montreal – where he appeared on stage in light comedies, ended his trip to Canada.

Dickens began working on the first of his Christmas tales, A Christmas Carol, published in 1843, which was followed by The Chimes in 1844 and The Cricket on the Hearth in 1845. Of these, A Christmas Carol was the most popular, and tapping into an old tradition did a lot to spark a renewed appetite for the joys of Christmas in the United Kingdom and America. On a trip to Manchester to observe the factory workers' conditions, Dickens' imagination was planted. Dickens had to decide to "strike a sledge hammer blow" for the homeless, as he had seen it before at the Field Lane Ragged School. Dickens became engrossed in the novel as the plot began to develop and manuscript began in earnest. As the story unfolded, he "wept and laughed, and wept once more" as he "walked around London's black streets for fifteen or twenty miles per night, when all sober people had gone to bed," he later said.

Dickens migrated to Switzerland (1846), where he began working on Dombey and Son (1846–48). Dickens' career's two books, this and David Copperfield (1849-51), mark a significant artistic shift in Dickens' career as his books became more popular and more planned than his early works.

He was alerted of a significant embezzlement at the firm where his brother, Augustus, worked (John Chapman & Co). It had been carried out by Thomas Powell, a clerk who had been on good terms with Dickens and who had served as a mentor to Augustus when he first started work. Powell was also an author and poet, and he knew several of the day's most popular writers. Powell went to New York and published The Living Authors of England, a book about Charles Dickens who was not amused by Powell's words. In an instant, Dickens sent Lewis Gaylord Clark, editor of the New York literary magazine The Knickerbocker, a letter that seemed to have enraged him. Powell said he based the name of Paul Dombey (Dombey and Son) on Thomas Chapman, one of the principal owners. Clark wrote the letter in the New-York Tribune, and several other newspapers picked up on the story. Powell began suing these publications, but Clark was arrested. Dickens contacted John Chapman & Co. to demand written evidence of Powell's guilt. Dickens did receive a note confirming Powell's embezzlement, but the directors did not want to reveal more details until they realized that this information would have to be submitted in court. Dickens eventually signed a private deal with Powell out of court due to the difficulties of obtaining evidence in America to back his charges.

In May 1846, Angela Burdett Coutts, the Coutts' heir, approached Dickens about the establishment of a home for the restored women of the working class. Coutts envisioned a home that would restructure existing institutions in a modern environment conducive to education and proficiency in domestic household chores. Dickens later established Urania Cottage in Shepherd's Bush, which he owned for ten years, setting the house rules, reviewing the accounts, and interviewing prospective residents. Dickens' women on leaving Urania Cottage, from which it is estimated that approximately 100 women graduated between 1847 and 1859, were mainly due to migration and marriage.

Dickens, a young man, expressed dissatisfaction with some aspects of organized faith. He defended the people's right to pleasure in 1836, fighting a push to outlaw games on Sundays in a pamphlet titled Under Three Heads. "Look into your churches – less congregations and scanty attendance." People have grown sullen and obstinate, and they are becoming dissatisfied with the belief that condemns them to such a day as this, once in every seven. They display their dissatisfaction with their exclusion from church. On Sunday, turn into the streets [on a Sunday] and see the drooping gloom that reigns over everything else."

Dickens honoured Jesus Christ. He is regarded as a professing Christian. Henry Fielding Dickens' son characterized him as someone who had "deep religious convictions." He had expressed an interest in Unitarian Christianity as a child in the 1840s, and Robert Browning noted that "Mr Dickens is an enlightened Unitarian." Professor Gary Colledge has claimed that he "never strayed from his attachment to popular lay Anglicanism." Dickens wrote The Life of Our Lord (1846), a book about Christ's life, which was written with the intention of sharing his faith with his children and families. Dickens echoed Geoffrey Chaucer's use of Luke 23:34 from Troilus and Criseyde (Dickens owned a copy in his library), with G. K. Chesterton's note, "among the most common canonical English writers, Chaucer and Dickens have the most in common."

Dickens condemned Roman Catholicism and 19th-century evangelicalism, seeing both as extremes of Christianity and likely to minimize personal expression, and he was concerned about religious institutions and philosophical traditions such as spiritualism, which he condemned in the book he wrote for his family in 1846. Although Dickens advocated for equal rights for Catholics in England, he was angry with how individual civil rights were often eroded in countries where Catholicism ruled and referred to the Catholic Church as "the curse on the world." Dickens denied the Evangelical argument that the Bible was the infallible word of God. Arthur Penrhyn Stanley's theory of "profound revelation" was similar to his the Liberal Anglican's argument on Biblical interpretation. Dickens was referred to by Leo Tolstoyevsky and Fyodor Dostoyevsky as "the great Christian writer."

Dickens took over the editorship of the London-based Daily News in December 1845, a liberal newspaper in which Dickens wished to promote "the Principles of Progress and Improvement, of Education, Civil and Religious Liberty, and Equal Legislation," in his own words. Thomas Hodgskin, the radical economist, and Douglas William Jerrold, a social reformer who regularly attacked the Corn Laws, were among the other contributors who wrote for the journal. Dickens lasted only ten weeks on the job before resigning due to a combination of exhaustion and insecurity with one of the paper's co-owners.

In a speech delivered in Paris in 1846, Francophile Dickens called the French "the first people in the universe." Dickens met with French literati Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Eugène Scribe, Théophile Gautier, François-René de Chateaubriand, and Eugène Sue during his visit to Paris. Dickens began to write David Copperfield in early 1849. It was published between 1849 and 1850. "Under ath the fiction lay a piece of the author's life," Dickens' biography, Life of Charles Dickens (1872). As he wrote in Dickens' preface to the author's 1867 book, it was his personal favorite among his own books.

Dickens moved into Tavistock House (1852–53), Hard Times (1854), and Little Dorrit (1856). It was here that he indulged in Forster's Life of Charles Dickens. He collaborated closely with Wilkie Collins, a writer and playwright, during this period. His writing enabled him to purchase Gads Hill Place in Higham, Kent, in 1856. Dickens had walked past the house as a child and wished to live in it. Part I, Henry IV's Henry IV, was also present in the area, and his literary association pleased him.

During this period, Dickens served as both the editor, editor, and a major contributor to the journals Household Words (1850–1859) and All the Year Round (1858–1870). Dickens volunteered his time in support of Layard's cause in 1855, when Dickens' faithful friend and Liberal MP Austen Henry Layard formed an Administrative Reform Association to demand major reforms of Parliament. Dickens believed that England's political aristocracy and incompetence were the death of England, with the exception of Lord John Russell, the only leading politician in whom Dickens had any faith and to whom he later dedicated A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens replied that the classes were already in opposition and that the aristocratic class had been blamed for the lamentation of class conflict. Dickens penned the Reform Association in Household Words. He also spoke out about foreign affairs, expressing his sympathy for Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini's leadership, saying that "a united Italy would be of utmost importance to the world's stability" and that "I feel for Italy almost as if I were born."

Dickens participated in widespread mockery of the East India Company for its involvement in the 1857 rebellion, but he reserved his fury for the rebels himself, hoping that he would be able to rid the race on whom the stain of the late cruelties rested.

Dickens hired professional actors for the play The Frozen Deep, written by him and his protégé, Wilkie Collins, in 1857. Dickens fell in love with Ellen Ternan, one of the actresses, and the love was to last the rest of his life. Dickens was 45 and Ternan 18 when he made the decision to divorce his wife, Catherine, in 1858; divorce was still unthinkable for someone as popular as he was. When Catherine left and never to see her husband again, she took with her one child, leaving the other children to be cared for by her sister Georgina, who chose to stay at Gads Hill.

Dickens was approached by Great Ormond Street Hospital during this time to assist it in coping with the first significant financial crisis. The hospital's founders believed that his "Drooping Buds" essay in Household Words earlier this year was the catalyst for the hospital's triumph. Dickens, whose philanthropy was well-known, was asked by his companion, Charles West, to preside over the appeal, and he threw himself into the case, body and soul. Dickens' public readings secured sufficient funds for an endowment to place the hospital on a sound financial footing; one reading alone raised £3,000.

Dickens' following his divorce, Dickens began a series of widely popular and remunerative reading tours, which, along with his journalism, would absorb the bulk of his creative energies for the next decade, in which he was only going to write only two more books. His first reading tour, which lasted from April 1858 to February 1859, saw 129 performances in 49 towns around England, Scotland, and Ireland. Dickens' continuing fascination with the dramatic world was woven into Nicholas Nickleby's theatre performances, but more importantly, he found a home in public readings. He undertook a series of public readings in England and Scotland in 1866, with more in England and Ireland the next year.

Other pieces that followed, including A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations (1861), were immediately followed by the author, who were both resounding successes. A Tale of Two Cities, set in London and Paris, is his best-known work of historical fiction, and it begins with "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." It is regularly regarded as one of the best-selling books of all time. Among the themes in Great Expectations are wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the eventual triumph of good over evil.

Dickens set a fire that destroyed the majority of his correspondence in early September 1860, in a field behind Gads Hill; only those letters on business matters were spared. Since Ellen Ternan destroyed all of his letters to her, the fullness of the affair between the two women remains speculative. Thomas Wright recalled that Ternan had unburdened herself to a Canon Benham in the 1930s and gave currency to rumors that they had been lovers. Dickens' daughter, Kate Perugini, who Gladys Storey had interviewed before her death in 1929, that the two had a son who died in infancy. Storey wrote an account in Dickens and Daughters, but no modern evidence exists. Dickens died on the death of his son, Ternan, who made her financially secure. Ternan was living with Dickens for the last 13 years of his life, according to Claire Tomalin's book The Invisible Woman. Little Nell, Simon Gray's book, was later turned into a film in 2013 and Little Nell, which was later turned into a play. Dickens developed his fascination with the paranormal during his time as a founder of The Ghost Club.

He was offered £10,000 for a reading tour of Australia in June 1862. He was excited, and even wrote The Uncommercial Traveller Upside Down, but decided against the trip, but ultimately decided against it. Both of his sons, Alfred D'Orsay Dickens, and Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, migrated to Australia, Edward Matthew Dickens becoming a member of the Parliament of New South Wales between 1889 and 1894.

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