Charles Dickens

F.R. Leavis and Q.D. Leavis on Dickens:

The forty years of his writing life were years of portentous change, and, in the way only a
great creative writer, sensitive to the full actuality of contemporary life, could, he registers
changing England in the succession of his books with wonderful vividness.

Charles Dickens, qtd. by John Forster in The Life of Charles Dickens:

The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless; of the
shame I felt in my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day by day,
what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy and emulation up by,
was passing away from me, never to be brought back any more, cannot be written. My whole
nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations, that even now,
famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and
children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time of my life.

representations of childhood

Oliver Twist
Dombey and Son
David Copperfield
Great Expectations
serialisation (instalments)

from: Charles Dickens, Bleak House:

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down
the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a
great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. [...]
And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High
Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.