CD
1812–1870
Charles Dickens
The Victorian city’s great showman and conscience. Serial novels turn fog, law, and childhood into popular epic.
Made the social novel a public event and a gallery of comic-grotesque types with tragic voltage.
Primary works
Novel · 1861
Great Expectations
Charles Dickens
Pip is lifted from the marshes by a hidden benefactor and learns how expensive gentility can be. The convict on the graveyard is the book’s first and last truth.
Bildungsroman
Novel · 1853
Bleak House
Charles Dickens
A chancery suit fogs London while Esther’s narrative and an omniscient voice braid private goodness to public rot. The law is weather.
Social novel