Charles Dickens Books

As I began to research the Charles Dickens books for this article, I was amazed at some things I read about the man and his out of the box thinking for his time. Why the sudden interest in Charles Dickens and his books, you ask? Well, the 200th anniversary of his birth was on February 7th, 2012.

It is not many authors who remain so well read almost a couple hundred years after they have passed on to the Great Library in the sky. Dickens, however, is one of those few. I did not realize that once his books were published they have never been out of print. As a lover of reading and books in general, I find that pretty amazing.

So, let's find out a little more about Charles Dickens the man and his books.

As I mentioned above, Dickens was born on Feb 7, 1812 and only lived to be 58 years old. One of the reasons that he could write about poverty and the injustices of the time was because it was a part of his young life. His entire family was sent to debtor's prison when he was 12. Young Charles spent time out of the prison working in a factory that made blackening for shoes. His job was to stick labels on the boxes of blacking. It was this time in those bad conditions that he based his later work, David Copperfield.

The iconic Victorian author, Charles Dickens, did not go about publishing his work in the traditional manner of his day or even for this era of time. It was not uncommon for an author to take his published book and put installments of the books in local newspapers or periodicals to garner some interest. Dickens sort of went at it backwards but I think it was shear genius on his part. None of his books started out as a book. Nope, he wrote monthly installments of each story that was then later published as a book after the installments were complete. He became a master at serials and the "cliffhanger". He had to know where to stop the story so that people looked forward to next month's installment. Pretty ingenious, I think!