What Charles Dickens argues

This is the hexagonal gallery of Charles Dickens (1812–1870), the writer who more than any other made the novel the conscience of the nineteenth century. No author did more to fix the shape of Victorian fiction: the crowded canvas, the serial instalment that left readers waiting a month for the next number, the unforgettable name that becomes a living person, and above all the conviction that a story could shame a nation into reform.
Dickens wrote for the magazine and the monthly part, and his England read him in instalments — laughing, weeping, and arguing over each new number. From the comic ramble of The Pickwick Papers he turned quickly to anger: the workhouse and the thieves’ den of Oliver Twist, the debtors’ prison of Little Dorrit, the industrial Coketown of Hard Times, and the endless killing lawsuit of Bleak House, where the law itself is the villain.
Yet he was never only a reformer. David Copperfield is his tender, half-remembered autobiography; A Tale of Two Cities is his great historical romance of revolution and sacrifice; Great Expectations is his most perfectly plotted study of a young man’s illusions. Eight public-domain novels, every one still in print, every one read aloud and adapted for stage and screen across two centuries.
Each card carries an authentic public-domain likeness of Dickens himself — the Gurney portrait of 1867, the Watkins photograph of 1858, and a Project Gutenberg engraving. All eight novels are in the public domain.

Primary works in Charles Dickens (9)

First Novels — Dickens is the heir of the early novelists. What Richardson, Fielding, and Austen began, he carried to a mass audience — turning the novel into the central literary form of the age and the monthly serial into its delivery machine.
First Mystery Novels and Stories — Bleak House gives English fiction one of its first detectives. Inspector Bucket, patiently unravelling the secrets of the Dedlock household, stands directly behind Wilkie Collins’s and Conan Doyle’s investigators — the police detective as a hero of the novel.
Satire — Dickens is a satirist as much as a storyteller. The Circumlocution Office of Little Dorrit, the Court of Chancery in Bleak House, and the statistical schoolroom of Hard Times ridicule the institutions of his day with the same moral fury that drives Swift and Voltaire.