Dickens, Charles, fiction

Abstract

Due in part to his mastery of the serial format, and in part to its distinctive idealism and investigative energy, Charles Dickens's fiction has reached an unprecedented range of readers, both socially and geographically, making his work – and the concept of “the Dickensian” – closely identified, in popular culture, with the Victorian era itself. A proportion of readers has always found Dickens's characterization lacking in the psychological depth achieved by certain other leading novelists of the era, but none can deny the force and originality of his creative faculty, which has given to Victorian literature its most memorable collection of comic and villainous characters. Strongly autobiographical in places, Dickens's fiction is also stylistically inventive and experimental, exploring many subgenres of short fiction, while testing the possibilities of the serial novel to their limits, in terms of structure and effect.