In my personal opinion and point of view, my work on Charles Dickens could be very useful to everybody who wants to know something about the Charles Dickens´ work or before to read his book, wants to know a bit more about him
I think that my work is very useful, because generally, when someone wants to learn about an author, starts to read his or her books and sometimes we forget that to know about the life, social context, etc... of the author, can help us to understand more his or her literature.
This is the reason, because in my work I don´t deal with any particular book. But in this way, you can read an article called " Criticism on Charles Dickens´Works ", in which you can found critic comments about his books, ( books are really important, too).
In my work I tried to collect his biography, a cronology and two articles: about the social class in times of Dickens and about his poputarity.
He was one of the great literary geniuses of all time and one of the most popular novelist of the 19th century. He was nicknamed, "The Inimitable" and qualified people who are years studiying about him, said that in all of English literature, his creativity is rivaled only by Shakespeare's.
Moreover, there are articles about the Victorian Literature, his relation with the Critical Theory, etc... For the Critical Theory, Dickens' work must take account of his linguistic virtuosity and his comic spirit.
In other way, I want to say that I choose Dickens for this work, because I like him; apart from to be a writer, he was a journalist too. Some of his books, like " Oliver Twist ", for me, seem more like reports, where you can see how the people of differents social classes lived at this time, than literary books. His hitories are very realists, but we could never read him, obviously, as the Victorians did.
Finally, and inside this subject opinion, I want you to read something that I found about Charles Dickens, which impacts me and made me really understand how important was Charles Dickens at his time:

" Dickens's genius, his obsession with work, his life-long love affair with his public, and his deep humanity all helped to make him a literary phenomenon. Because his works appealed to people of all conditions, and because he could take advantage of new technological developments, he reached, from the publication of the Pickwick Papers on, an audience of unprecedented size -- an audience which he was able to influence emotionally to an extent never equalled. He was not merely a writer but also a public figure. He was, for example, widely regarded as the best after-dinner speaker, as well the best amateur actor, of his day, and during his own lifetime he became a mythic figure: when he died, a (perhaps apocryphal) little girl cried "Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?"
(© Ralph Waldo Emerson )

Academic year 1998 / 1999
© a. r. e. a. / Dr. Vicente Forés López
© Maria del Carmen Sánchez Catalán
Universitat de València Press