If you do not, I am sorry for you, and that is the end of the matter. Stanley Baldwin Charles Dickens was the English writer of his age. Rambunctious, touching, tragic and comic by turns, his novels captured the public’s imagination like no others before or since. He transmuted the realities he saw into an enthralling and encyclopedic social panorama of hypnotic power. His works effectively constitute a world, such that even those who have read little of the author know what is meant by the term Dickensian. The master storyteller wrote a canon of classics. His books weave together darkness and light, romance and melodrama, the terrifying and the tender; one moment they are gruesome and fantastical, the next tear-inducingly funny. From the debtors’ prison of Little Dorrit (1855–7) to the workhouse and thieves’ dens of Oliver Twist (1837–8), to the machinations of the Chancery Court in Bleak House (1852–3), Dickens created a vision of London as a pulsating, living organism, which even today dominates our conceptions of the Victorian metropolis.
