Now, although the roots of the mystery story in serious literature go back as far as Balzac, Dickens, and Poe, it was not until the closing decades of the 19th century that the private detective became an established figure in popular fiction.

By her eighteenth birthday her bent for writing was so evident that Papa and Mamma gave her a Life Of Dickens as a spur to her aspiration.

Dickens was not for nothing the most theatrical of the great Victorian writers.

It never registered with them that I had time to read all of Balzac, Dickens, and Stendhal while Papa was dying, not to mention everything in the city library after Mother's operation.

Charles Dickens was a prominent English author of the 19th century.

The prison was called Dickens Hill.

Among Bulwer-Lytton's lesser-known contributions to literature is the fact that it was he who convinced Charles Dickens to revise the ending of Great Expectations to make it more palatable to the reading public.

David Lean was also rapidly becoming a force in world cinema with Brief Encounter and his Dickens adaptations Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger would experience the best of their creative partnership with films like Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes.

The early films were often melodramatic in tone, and there was a distinct preference for storylines which were already known to the audience-in particular adaptations of Shakespeare plays and Dickens ' novels.

Orwell spent time in Wallington and Southwold working on a Dickens essay and it was in July 1939 that Orwell's father, Richard Blair, died.

Reynolds was also responsible for The Mysteries of London which has been accorded an important place in the development of the urban as a particularly Victorian Gothic setting, an area within which interesting links can be made with established readings of the work of Dickens and others.

The genre was also a heavy influence on more mainstream writers, such as Charles Dickens, who read Gothic novels as a teenager and incorporated their gloomy atmosphere and melodrama into his own works, shifting them to a more modern period and an urban setting, including Oliver Twist ( 1837-8 ), Bleak House ( 1854 ) ( Mighall 2003 ) and Great Expectations ( 1860 – 61 ).

* Dr. Manette, in Dickens ' A Tale of Two Cities, was thrown into the Bastille prison by means of a lettre de cachet.

They are sometimes compared to the work of his older contemporary J. R. R. Tolkien, but his surreal fiction was influenced by his early love for Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson rather than Tolkien's studies of mythology and philology.

It was mentioned by Charles Dickens, became a Lyons Corner House, and is now a Co-operative Bank.

Victorian Britain, like the periods before it, was interested in literature ( see Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle and William Makepeace Thackeray ), theatre and the arts ( see Aesthetic movement and Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood ), and music, drama, and opera were widely attended.

* June 12 – The Arts Club – was founded by Charles Dickens, Frederic Leighton and others in Hanover Square, London.

Dickens ' essay was arguably a pose of manly, no-nonsense realism and a defense of Christianity.

During the Victorian era, Thackeray was ranked second only to Charles Dickens, but he is now much less read and is known almost exclusively for Vanity Fair.

The same engraved illustration appeared on the canary-yellow cover of each monthly part ; this colour became Thackeray's signature ( as a light blue-green was Dickens '), allowing passers-by to notice a new Thackeray number in a bookstall from a distance.

Critic Richard Lehan says that " Balzac was the bridge between the comic realism of Dickens and the naturalism of Zola.

Charles Dickens was another enthusiast and the atmosphere of the Nights pervades the opening of his last novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood ( 1870 ).

Ponzi did not invent the scheme ( for example, Charles Dickens ' 1844 novel Martin Chuzzlewitt and 1857 novel Little Dorrit each described such a scheme ), but his operation took in so much money that it was the first to become known throughout the United States.

Charles Dickens was not impressed: " It is certainly the work of amateurs ; very feeble amateurs at the beginning and very heedless some of them too ".

Powell "... ingratiated himself into the Dickens household " and was discovered to be a forger and a thief, having embezzled £ 10, 000 from his employer.

Through such details Dickens indicates at the outset that guilt is a part of the ironic bond between Pip and Magwitch which is so unpredictably to alter both their lives.

" Selznick let him go, and Laughton recommended comedian and Dickens scholar W. C. Fields for the part, who was borrowed from Paramount Pictures.

The poem was inspired in part by a talking raven in the novel Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of ' Eighty by Charles Dickens.

The plot of Dickens ' original novel is considerably simplified for the purposes of the musical, with Fagin being represented more as a comic character than as a villain, and large portions of the latter part of the story being completely left out.

Critics such as Cheri Larsen Hoeckley, Kathleen Hickok, and Natalie Joy Woodall argue that the demise of Procter's reputation is due at least in part to the way Charles Dickens characterized her as a " model middle-class domestic angel " and a " fragile and modest saint " rather than as an " active feminist and strong poet.

Other notable buildings are the Royal Hop Pole Hotel in Church Street ( which has recently been converted into a part of the Wetherspoons pub chain with the discovery of a former medieval banqueting hall in the structure ), mentioned in Charles Dickens ' The Pickwick Papers, the Bell Hotel, a large half-timbered structure opposite the Abbey gateway, and the House of the Nodding Gables in the High Street.

The poet and novelist Vincent McHugh however, reviewing the novel for the New York Herald Tribune Books in 1936, declared it as having affinities with George Gissing, a writer Orwell greatly admired, and placed the novel in a particular tradition, that of Dickens and Gissing: " Mr Orwell too writes of a world crawling with poverty, a horrible dun flat terrain in which the abuses marked out by those earlier writers have been for the most part only deepened and consolidated.

They then return to the Gate House, which after the Dissolution of the monasteries was put to many uses, with Shakespeare, Dr Johnson, Hogarth and Dickens all taking part in its story.

** David Copperfield, part 1, by Charles Dickens

** David Copperfield, part 2, by Charles Dickens

Cobham has strong links with Charles Dickens, who used to walk out to the village: he set part of The Pickwick Papers there.

Hugh, finding a handbill left at the Maypole, joins the Protestant throng Dickens describes as " sprinkled doubtless here and there with honest zealots, but composed for the most part of the very scum and refuse of London, whose growth was fostered by bad criminal laws, bad prison regulations, and the worst conceivable police.

* Charles Dickens visited Chertsey to make notes for his novel Oliver Twist ( 1838 ), in which Oliver is forced by Bill Sikes to take part in the attempted burglary of a house in Chertsey.

Breach-of-promise actions were part of the standard stock-in-trade of comic writers of the 19th century ( such as Charles Dickens in his Pickwick Papers, or Gilbert and Sullivan in Trial by Jury ), but most middle-and upper-class families were reluctant to use them except in rather extreme circumstances ( such as when a daughter became pregnant by a man who then refused to marry her ), since they led to wide publicity being given to a scrutiny of intimate personal concerns, something which was strongly repugnant to the family feeling of the period ( especially where young women were concerned ).

Adaptations of novels by Dickens, Tolstoy, and others formed a significant part of the repertoire, along with classical works from Molière and Shakespeare.

In the 1970s he played, to great acclaim, the role of Charles Dickens in the miniseries Dickens of London which was presented in the United States as a thirteen part series on Masterpiece Theatre.

During the 2010 Conservative Party Conference, Gove announced that school curriculum would be restructured, and that study of authors such as Byron, Keats, Jane Austen, Dickens and Thomas Hardy would be reintroduced to English lessons as part of a plan to improve children ’ s grasp of English literature and language.

Dickens took part in the general outcry against the sentence, which was eventually commuted to transportation.

In January 1857 he took a part in Collins's play The Frozen Deep, which starred Dickens and was performed at his home, Tavistock House ( Egg played John Want, the ship's cook.

The first part was subtitled Nobody's Fault, an allusion to one of Dickens ' proposed titles for the original novel, and the story developed from the perspective and experiences of the Arthur Clennam character.

He played the part of Dickens, and I just loved doing that.

In 2012, she played a small part as Mrs Beeton in an episode of the BBC educational programme The Charles Dickens Show.