Generally regarded as the greatest English novelist, Charles Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity than any previous author had done during his lifetime. Much in his work could appeal to simple and sophisticated, to the poor and to the Queen, and technological developments as well as the qualities of his work enabled his fame to spread worldwide very quickly. His long career saw fluctuations in the reception and sales of individual novels, but none of them was negligible or uncharacteristic or disregarded, and, though he is now admired for aspects and phases of his work that were given less weight by his contemporaries, his popularity has never ceased and his present critical standing is higher than ever before. The most abundantly comic of English authors, he was much more than a great entertainer. The range, compassion, and intelligence of his apprehension of his society and its shortcomings enriched his novels and made him both one of the great forces in 19th-century literature and an influential spokesman of the conscience of his age.

Charles Dickens first attracted attention with the descriptive essays and tales originally written for newspapers, beginning in 1833, and collected as Sketches by "Boz" (1836). On the strength of this volume Dickens contracted to write a historical novel in the tradition of Scott (eventually published as Barnaby Rudge in 1841). By chance his gifts were turned into a more distinctive channel. In February 1836 he agreed to write the text for a series of comic engravings. The unexpected result was The Pickwick Papers (1836-37), one of the funniest novels in English literature. By July 1837 sales of the monthly installments exceeded 40,000 copies. Dickens' extraordinary popular appeal and the enormous imaginative potential of the Victorian novel were simultaneously established.

 The chief technical features of Dickens' fiction were also formed by this success. Serial publication encouraged the use of multiple plot and required that each episode be individually shaped. At the same time it produced an unprecedentedly close relationship between author and reader. Part dramatist, part journalist, part mythmaker, and part wit, Dickens took the picaresque tradition of Smollett and Fielding and gave it a Shakespearean vigour and variety.

 His early novels have been attacked at times for sentimentality, melodrama, or shapelessness. They are now increasingly appreciated for their comic or macabre zest and their poetic fertility. Dombey and Son (1846-48) marks the beginning of Dickens' later period. He thenceforth combined his gift for vivid caricature with a stronger sense of personality, designed his plots more carefully, and used symbolism to give his books greater thematic coherence. Of the masterpieces of the next decade, David Copperfield (1849-50) uses the form of a fictional autobiography to explore the great Romantic theme of the growth and comprehension of the self. Bleak House (1852-53) addresses itself to law and litigiousness, Hard Times (1854) is a Carlylian defense of art in an age of mechanism, and Little Dorrit (1855-57) dramatizes the idea of imprisonment, both literal and spiritual. Two great novels, both involved with issues of social class and human worth, appeared in the 1860s: Great Expectations (1860-61) and Our Mutual Friend (1864-65). His final book, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (published posthumously, 1870), was left tantalizingly uncompleted at the time of his death.