Supervisor Elham AbolFateh
Editor in Chief Mohamed Wadie

Remembering Greatest English Novelist Charles Dickens


Thu 17 Feb 2022 | 12:31 PM
Ahmed Emam

This month marks the 210th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens, the greatest English novelist, and author.

He is widely cited as the finest Victorian author, and some Literature experts rank him second only to William Shakespeare in the field of English literature.

Dickens, who died of an apparent stroke on June 9, 1870, produced more than a dozen major novels, many short stories, including (Christmas-themed stories and ghost stories and baby stories), several plays, several non-fiction books, and inpidual essays and articles. His seminal work has been translated into every major language and his plays are also performed around the world.

Throughout his long-standing career, Dickens was viewed as a popular entertainer of fecund imagination, while later critics championed his mastery of prose, and his endless invention of memorable characters, such as (Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, and David Copperfield).

The overwhelming success of his remarkable English novels and short stories during his lifetime and to the present is demonstrated by the fact that none have ever gone out of print. Dickens played a major role in popularizing the serialized novel. The remarkable novelist is remembered by many as the greatest writer of his time.

Born in Portsmouth, to John Dickens, a naval pay clerk, and Elizabeth Dickens, he made his debut as a law clerk, a junior office position with the potential to become a lawyer.

According to English historians, Dickens did not like the law as a profession, and after a while as a court stenographer, he became a journalist, reporting parliamentary debate and traveling Britain by stagecoach to cover election campaigns.

At the age of 50, he embarked on what was virtually a new career, producing in the first of a remarkable series of novels and other fictional writings that resulted in his being called the father of the English novel.

It was true enough. In the 1840s and 1850s, Dickens' writings were extremely popular in England and were read extensively.

At that time, he was also widely tipped to be a potential successor to the great English writer Shakespeare.