Charles Dickens despised the Victorian legal system. In “ Bleak House ,” he invented the epic, decades-spanning Jarndyce v.

THE LIFE AND LIES OF CHARLES DICKENS, by Helena Kelly The specter of biography has long struck fear in the hearts of living legends. Martha Washington, Henry James and Somerset Maugham tried to ...

John Forster’s “The Life of Charles Dickens,” published in 1872, served for many years as the standard biography. Its primary source was Dickens himself, who assumed that Forster would ...

But it was the little-known story about Dickens’s visit to Ohio in 1842 that got the creative juices flowing, resulting in a new biography ... ignored story of Charles Dickens’s visit to ...

Edmund Wilson’s essay about Charles Dickens, “The Two Scrooges,” and Edgar Johnson’s distinguished two-volume biography, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, “both mentioned this ...

The second of eight children, Charles John Huffam Dickens was born in February 1812 to John Dickens, a clerk for the Royal Navy, and his wife Elizabeth. Aged 12, Dickens was sent to work at a boot ...

The book was an overnight sensation, and Charles Dickens, already famous, became a legend. LEON LITVACK: Some people would consider him the originator of Christmas or the inventor of Christmas.

Nevertheless, the existence of such an annotated biography demonstrates just how complex the pair's friendship was, according to Emma Harper, curator at the Charles Dickens Museum. "It was quite a ...