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His final novels were "A tale of two cities" and "Great expectations"
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Now we are going to talk about his two first novels
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Much drawn to the theatre, Dickens nearly became a professional actor in 1832. In 1833 he began contributing stories and descriptive essays to magazines and newspapers; these attracted attention and were reprinted as Sketches by “Boz” (February 1836). The same month, he was invited to provide a comic serial narrative to accompany engravings by a well-known artist; seven weeks later the first installment of The Pickwick Papers appeared.
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His happiest childhood years were spent in Chatham (1817–22), an area to which he often reverted in his fiction. From 1822 he lived in London, until, in 1860, he moved permanently to a country house, Gad’s Hill, near Chatham. His origins were middle class, if of a newfound and precarious respectability; one grandfather had been a domestic servant, and the other an embezzler. His father, a clerk in the navy pay office, was well paid.
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When Charles Dickens was born and when he died.
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His schooling, interrupted and unimpressive, ended at 15. He became a clerk in a solicitor’s office, then a shorthand reporter in the lawcourts (thus gaining a knowledge of the legal world often used in the novels), and finally, like other members of his family, a parliamentary and newspaper reporter.
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Esther Summerson describes her childhood and says she is leaving for the home of a new guardian, Mr. Jarndyce, along with Ada Clare and Richard Carstone. On the way to the home, called Bleak House, they stop overnight at the Jellybys’ chaotic home. When they finally reach Bleak House, they meet Mr. Jarndyce and settle in. They meet Mr. Skimpole, a man who acts like a child.
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Thomas Gradgrind, a wealthy, retired merchant in the industrial city of Coketown, England, devotes his life to a philosophy of rationalism, self-interest, and fact. He raises his oldest children, Louisa and Tom, according to this philosophy and never allows them to engage in fanciful or imaginative pursuits. He founds a school and charitably takes in one of the students, the kindly and imaginative Sissy Jupe, after the disappearance of her father, a circus entertainer
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Was an experiment, relying less than before on characterization, dialogue, and humour. An exciting and compact narrative, it lacks too many of his strengths to count among his major works. Sydney Carton’s self-sacrifice was found deeply moving by Dickens and by many readers; Dr. Manette now seems a more impressive achievement in serious characterization. The French Revolution scenes are vivid, if superficial in historical understanding.
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resembles David Copperfield in being a first-person narration and in drawing on parts of Dickens’s personality and experience. Compact like its predecessor, it lacks the panoramic inclusiveness of Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend, but, though not his most ambitious, it is his most finely achieved novel. The hero Pip’s mind is explored with great subtlety, and his development through a childhood and youth beset with hard tests of character is traced critically but sympathetically
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He was politicaly more despondent,emotionally more tragic.The satire is harsher,the humour less genial and abundant,the "happy endings".His art here is more akin to poetry than to what is suggested by the photographic or journalist comparasions.
