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Links | Bibliography | Perspectives | Author List (1812–1870) Charles Dickens was the most popular novelist of his century. Anthony Trollope observed that Dickens's works could be found "in every house in which books are kept." He published his novels in monthly or weekly parts, and whole families would gather in suspense to hear a newly published episode read aloud. He was equally renowned in America: a ship arriving in New York from England was mobbed by crowds frantic to learn whether one of his characters, Little Nell, had died. Generations of readers have sometimes found Dickens's sentimentality hard to take: Oscar Wilde said that "one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing." But they have also been fascinated by Dickens's deftly elaborated symbolism. Almost all his works are permeated by a dominant symbol-system (railways in Dombey and Son, prisons in Little Dorrit, dustheaps in Our Mutual Friend) that helped him establish thematic unity among the monthly installments. With an inventiveness of character and density of imagery equaled only by Shakespeare, Dickens worked out in astonishing detail the complex connections binding members of a society to their environment, to their institutions, and to each other. He is the quintessential urban novelist: his mythic vision of Victorian London is so intense, surprising, and phantasmagoric that the fractured, paranoid Modernist landscapes of Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Joyce, and Woolf all seem to have originated with Dickens.
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