Major Works
Pickwick Papers (1836-37)
Oliver Twist (1837-38)
A Christmas Carol (1843)
David Copperfield (1849-50)
Bleak House (1852-53)
Hard Times (1854)
Little Dorrit (1855-57)
Great Expectations (1860-61)

Biographical Notes
Dickens was born and spent a happy early childhood near the sea in Chatham, where his father, John,  was a Navy pay office clerk.  Following a series of financial setbacks due in large part to John Dickens's extravagance and improvidence, the family ended up in London. For several months John and all the family but Charles were imprisoned in the Marshalsea debtors' prison.  While his family lived in the prison and after, 12-year-old Charles supported himself and his family by working in a shoe-blacking factory pasting labels on bottles.  This early experience with poverty and social degradation had a profound lifelong influence on Dickens, and much of his life and fiction seems a clear reaction against the horrors of this six-month period in the blacking factory.

After intermittent schooling, Dickens was apprenticed as a law clerk, where one of his responsibilities was shorthand recording of court proceedings, and he later became a parliamentary reporter for the press.  He published a series of fictional sketches on typical London scenes and characters (Sketches by Boz, 1836-37) which  was received with enthusiasm.  Close after, the overwhelming popularity of The Pickwick Papers (1836-37) quickly established Dickens as a major novelist.  From 1837 until his death and beyond, Dickens reigned supreme as the most popular novelist worldwide—and some would say the greatest of his era.

In 1858 Dickens endured scandal when he separated from his wife, Catherine, with whom he had ten children, and set up a house for his 18-year-old mistress, the actress Ellen Ternan.  In his final years Dickens gave a series of exhausting public readings, which together with his continued writing and the management of his weekly magazine All the Year Round led to a fatal stroke in 1870.

Mixed reaction, then and now
From his time to ours, critics have tried to condemn Dickens as a "mere entertainer"—not someone to be regarded as a serious literary artist.  In part, the sheer persistence of Dickens's popularity—he still sells well in commercial bookstores, and of course he figures prominently in high school and college syllabi—this persistent popularity is reinforced by some scholars who see Dickens as a great natural genius and conscious artist in fiction despite his overt commercialism.  [Consistently the 20th century has determined that popularity is the "artist's" greatest nightmare.]  Several decades of renewed attention to the symbolism, the social commentary, and the narrative technique in Dickens's later novels has allowed him a measure of critical respectability he did not enjoy in the first 40 years of the 20th century.  To me, the dispute over Dickens's relative "artistic merit" boils down to each individual's personal reaction to Dickens: some people are charmed by his humor and the peculiarly "Dickensian" language and wildly eccentric characters, others are not.  Those who believe that art must always be serious and preferably "realistically negative" or pessimistic; or that "real art" must be too complex for non-academic readers to enjoy—well, . . . these people don't think much of Dickens.

Dickens under fire
· "His books were too popular to be really any good—he catered to the public instead of adhering to a personal sense of artistic integrity."
· Too sentimental—too often overtly appealing to the emotions: tears, anger, laughter.
· Too sensational—novels depict unrealistic extremes.
· Too melodramatic—good characters are too good, bad characters are too "bad."
· Too much coincidence in his intricate plots—plots are not plausible, sometimes not neatly unified, characters introduced "as needed" (Monks, e.g., in Oliver Twist).
· Characters are not realistic, especially women and the more eccentric minor characters.
· His books are too openly rhetorical—that is, he often tells the reader what to think instead of allowing the characters and events speak for themselves.

Serial publication
Before they were issued in bound volumes, Dickens's novels were published in weekly or monthly installments, often in Dickens's own magazines (Household Words, after 1859 All the Year Round). Oliver Twist was first published in Bentley's Miscellany, a magazine for which Dickens worked as editor.  Serial publication explains in part the "cliffhanger" endings to many of Dickens's chapters, and too, it may explain Dickens's tendency to draw such sharply extravagant characters—often, readers had to keep up with a dizzying array of characters in the novels over a period of up to 20 months.

Comedic techniques
Influenced  largely by the popular theater of his day, Dickens's main strategies of humor are caricature and farce, two forms of exaggeration.  Typically, his comic characters are given specific exaggerated traits or speech-characteristics ("tags") that by force of repetition may be funny (i.e. Grimwig's saying "I'll eat my head" and Mr. Bumble's huge self-importance).  Farce involves exaggeration not of characteristics but of action (i.e. the reaction to Oliver's asking for "more" in the workhouse).

Social criticism
Through satire, irony, and outright rhetorical declaration, most of Dickens's novels take aim at particular aspects or institutions of Victorian society: workhouses in Oliver Twist, Chancery courts in Bleak House, prisons in Little Dorrit, Utilitarianism in Hard Times, America in Martin Chuzzlewit, just to name a few.  Regarding Oliver Twist more particularly, Dickens satirizes the Poor Laws of 1834, which sought to make workhouse conditions so harsh that people would be discouraged from applying for public assistance.

Themes and motifs to consider in Oliver Twist::

The workhouse, "the system" in which Oliver grows up
Different types of charity: public vs. private
Depiction of women--Rose Maylie and Nancy
Crime and realism: anti-romantic?
Fairy tale and nightmare
Nature vs. nurture in forming Oliver's character:"blood" vs. environment
What makes a good villain: Noah Claypole, Bill Sikes, Fagin, and Monks
Dickensian humor: mockery and exaggeration
Crime and punishment
Melodrama and sentimentality
Narrative technique: how does Dickens keep readers reading

More on Dickens

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