“It is known, to the force of a single pound weight, what the engine will do; but, not all the calculators of the National Debt can tell me the capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or discontent, for the decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse.”

English writer and journalist, Victorian era

Charles Dickens was an English writer and journalist of the Victorian era. He is best known for creating some of literature’s most familiar fictional characters, and he remains closely associated with the novel form he helped define. His books and short stories were hugely popular in his lifetime, and later critics and scholars came to regard him as a literary genius. His work is still widely read, with many readers drawn to the vivid characters and social detail that made his fiction endure.