Charles Dickens
Bleak House, Great Expectations — the Victorian imagination
The novelist as institution. His characters — Scrooge, Pip, Miss Havisham, Mr Micawber — have escaped their books and entered the language. Bleak House is the greatest social novel in English; Great Expectations the most perfectly constructed. He invented the modern Christmas, the serial novel, and the celebrity author.
Key works
- Bleak House1853— The law's delay — London as fog and labyrinth
- Great Expectations1861— The most perfectly plotted English novel
- David Copperfield1850— His own favorite — autobiography as fiction