This Day in History: English writer Charles Dickens was born on this day in 1812. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime and, by the 20th century, critics and scholars had recognized him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are still widely read today. His stories had a big impact, and the illiterate poor would pay for his stories, opening up literature to a whole new class of people. I recently read Great Expectations and his writing still holds up. He also gave us: Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, The Old Curiosity Shop, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, The Signal-Man and much more.
Charles Dickens had a disdain for law and lawyers, and this worked his way into some of his writings (Mr. Tulkinghorne and Uriah Heep). In A Tale of Two Cities Dickens wrote that taxes started the French Revolution. Ironically, France still has high taxes.
Dickens wrote in 1861 that American presidents no longer had the qualities of the Founding Fathers, “The system, for some reason, does not choose great men but brings to the top unknowns who have little really going for them and little really quality of greatness.”
Dickens complained of a lack of copyright protections in America, though he was actually paid royalties by three American publishers and he earned more royalties from the sale of books in the US, where he had no copyright protection, than in England, where he did.
His Bleak House had an early ode to Public Choice theory (where self-interest is the primary driving force behind all human actions). "The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme, and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble."
Many like to portray Dickens as a Socialist, but he was a wildly successful capitalist and entrepreneur, a driving force behind the great nineteenth-century innovation of the serialized, commercial novel.
See also In Defense of Scrooge
Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen
The Mysterious Charles Dickens By Lyndon Orr 1912
Charles Dickens and "Great Expectations"
The 1850's the Greatest Decade in the History of the English Novel by William Phelps
A Look at The Victorian Novel, 1906 Article
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