Charles Dickens

Dickens first rose to national fame with this novel, which didn't begin as a novel at all. Hired to prepare a series of short sketches to accompany some illustrations the publisher had commissioned, Dickens quickly took over. The result was The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, a sprawling comic story about the travels and adventures of Mr. Pickwick and his friends through the old-fashioned coaching inns of the south of England.

Dickens decided to turn Oliver Twist into a novel after publishing several serial parts as a short story. The result is one of his most rambling, loosely plotted novels, but it still contains some of his most famous characters, lines, and episodes.

Legend has it that when the ships carrying the final installments of this, one of Dickens' most famous works, docked in New York, crowds thronged the piers to ask about the fate of Little Nell. Dickens weaves the story of Nell and her grandfather together with an assortment of grotesque and comic characters into one of the most famous serial novels of all time.

Dombey and Son contains some of Dickens' most poignant character studies, as well as some of his most incisive social commentary. It also gives us one of Dickens' most memorable characters, in Major Joseph Bagstock.

Bleak House begins with a description of the London fog stifling the Court of Chancery, and follows that court's influence through a complex series of events, including murder, scandal, and stranger phenomena. Tense, atmospheric, and at times viciously incisive, all of Dickens' favorite targets come in for satire, and Dickens also gives us one of his most pathetic characters in Jo the sweep.

In Dickens' shortest novel, an industrialist's obsession with facts and figures wreaks havoc on his own family's lives, as well as the lives of the people around them. Dickens' most straightforward novel lacks the comic diversions and enormous cast of characters of his other works.

At his death, Dickens had written six of a projected twelve parts of this atmospheric novel about love, obsession, and murder. Three had already been published. Unlike with many other writers' final novels, the publisher did not hire another writer to finish the novel, but published the unfinished work as it stood. Since then, many conclusions have been suggested, including a once-popular version which was allegedly dictated to a medium by Dickens' ghost; but the original story still retains its mystery and power.