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This emphasis on rounded characterisation and complex structure would bear fruit in his most autobiographical work, David Copperfield. Although it retained comic elements, the narrative was more psychologically acute and focused than Dickens’ earlier work. The first signs of a change of pace and deepening maturity came with his next novel, Dombey and Son, in 1846. A trip to the United States in 1842 resulted in the transatlantic saga Martin Chuzzlewit the following year. With each publication Dickens was developing as an author at a tremendous rate and, in 1843, he invented the notion of the traditional British Christmas with the enormously influential festive novella A Christmas Carol. There followed the rumbustious comedy of Nicholas Nickleby, the moving drama of The Old Curiosity Shop, and the first of Dickens’ two historical novels, Barnaby Rudge. Oliver Twist to David Copperfieldĭickens built swiftly on the success of The Pickwick Papers with a grittier tale of destitution and organised crime in the capital, called Oliver Twist. The comic picaresque proved hugely popular and was quickly collected together in book form.
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The following year saw the appearance of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club in monthly instalments.
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Assuming the pseudonym of Boz, he published his first collection, Sketches by Boz, in 1836. Upon leaving school at fifteen, Dickens found work as a court reporter and began to contribute short stories and essays to periodicals. Although this state-of-affairs lasted only a few months, the first-hand experience of poverty shaped much of Dickens’ literary output and contributed to him becoming one of the fiercest critics of social deprivation of the Victorian age. When Charles was twelve his father was imprisoned in the Marshalsea debtor’s prison, a momentous event in the young Dickens’ life which forced him out of school and into a ‘blacking’ factory to help support his impecunious family. Dickens was born in Portsmouth in 1812, the second of eight children, but the family moved to London two years later.