Literary History

Six Things About Charles Dickens That Will Change How You Read Him

Charles Dickens is one of those writers you think you know. You've read him — or at least seen the BBC adaptations — and you have a sense of the man: Victorian humanitarian, brilliant satirist, champion of the poor, inventor of Christmas as we celebrate it today. All of this is true. But none of it is the whole picture. Here are six things about Dickens that the novels hint at but his biography makes clear.

1. He Was a Driven, Almost Manic Worker

Dickens published most of his major novels in serial installments while simultaneously editing magazines, writing journalism, giving public readings (which exhausted him to the point of breakdown), maintaining an enormous social correspondence, and managing a household that grew to ten children. He walked ten to twenty miles a day — often at night, through the streets of London — because he could not stop. His productivity was extraordinary, and it cost him. By his final years he was significantly physically diminished, and he died of a stroke at 58.

2. His Childhood Shaped Everything

When Dickens was twelve, his father was imprisoned for debt at Marshalsea Prison in London. Young Charles was sent to work in a boot-blacking factory, a trauma he kept secret for most of his adult life. He never fully recovered from the shame and abandonment of that experience, and it surfaces, barely disguised, in David Copperfield. His lifelong obsession with the poor and with the cruelty of institutions was not abstract sympathy; it was personal memory.

3. He Was an Ambivalent Christian

For a writer so saturated in biblical allusion, Dickens's actual relationship to Christianity was complicated. He rejected several central doctrines including the Atonement, described organised religion with frequent skepticism, and compiled his own simplified New Testament for his children — essentially a retelling of Jesus's ethical teaching stripped of theological superstructure. Yet his fiction is profoundly moral in ways that owe everything to the Christian tradition he couldn't quite leave behind.

4. He Loved the Theatre — and Performance Was His Secret Engine

Dickens performed his own works publicly for most of the latter half of his career, and his readings were theatrical events that could move audiences to simultaneous laughter and tears. But the theatrical impulse went deeper than the stage. His characterisation — the grotesque exaggeration, the unforgettable mannerisms, the vivid physical descriptions — is essentially theatrical in nature. He saw his characters before he understood them.

5. His Social Campaigning Was Concrete and Effective

Dickens didn't just write about social problems; he investigated them. He toured institutions, visited prisons and workhouses, corresponded with reformers, and used his fame to open doors. He supported Urania Cottage, a home for women who had been released from prison or were otherwise in desperate circumstances, for a decade. His campaigning journalism about the Yorkshire schools — the brutal boarding schools that appear in Nicholas Nickleby — contributed directly to legislative reform.

6. His Legacy in Historical Fiction

For writers of Victorian-set historical fiction, Dickens is inescapable and useful. The sheer granularity of his social observation — the slang, the food, the street geography, the class anxieties — is invaluable as historical source material. But he's also a warning. His female characters are often failures of imagination by contemporary standards. His narrative solutions sometimes rely on coincidence he hadn't fully earned. Great writers can be instructive precisely through their weaknesses, and Dickens is one of the most instructive who ever lived.

The Charles Dickens Museum in London houses his personal library and correspondence and is an extraordinary resource for anyone researching the Victorian world he depicted.

See also: more literary history articles and book guides for Victorian fiction.